


i've lost it all, i'm just a silhouette

by AssumingMinds19



Series: in the place that you left [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Erratic Emotions, F/F, Grief/Mourning, I can't let go of this damn idea, Mental Illnesses, Mentions of Character Death, Mentions of Suicidal Thoughts, Met in a Graveyard AU Part 2, Moving On, Religion, Sequel, Survivor Guilt, anger issues, inadequacy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:00:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27003952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AssumingMinds19/pseuds/AssumingMinds19
Summary: Lena threw the watch at the wall. Impassioned, maybe. Frustrated, definitely. But the crack it made when it landed and bounced to the floor stopped everything, the time on its face and in the room.“I’m not some damsel in a tower.” It had felt like an eternity, it took that long for Kara to drag her eyes away from the broken thing on the ground to Lena’s face as she continued to speak. “You can’t protect everyone.”“I’ve lost too many people.” The fight in Kara was gone, replaced with overwhelming distress. Some animal instinct to protect, protect, protect flaring angry and neon. “I’m not going to lose you too.”Kara felt a ghost in her life more often than not. Either angry and alone, grief-struck and lonely, or trying not to show how desperately she wanted to be with Lena. Right now, every part was colliding like a horrific crash, too fascinating to look away from, and Lena was watching her with such naked sincerity that Kara’s stomach plummeted through and out of her."I'm not Alex."Kara hadn't hidden any of it at all.
Relationships: Alex Danvers & Kara Danvers, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Previous Lena Luthor/Sam Arias
Series: in the place that you left [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1969501
Comments: 68
Kudos: 190





	1. Destroy

**Author's Note:**

> I know it’s an old platitude, but sometimes you have moments in your life where you realise how fragile and precious it really is. I hope everyone reading this is safe and happy, and if you aren’t even though I can’t do much to help, my thoughts are with you. 
> 
> This one’s for all of you ❤️

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones  
> 'Cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs  
> Setting fire to our insides for fun  
> Collecting names of the lovers that went wrong  
> The lovers that went wrong

Kara Danvers wasn't nice.

And no, she didn't mean that in some sort of moral recidivist type of way, she just knew that right now at this point she was not nice. She'd never been comfortable being the nice girl really, but to play the part, to be seen as abundantly normal, that was the role she had been shunted into.

_'Play it safe.'_

_'Be gentle.'_

_'Slowly.'_

_'Don't draw attention to yourself.'_

What a load of horseshit.

It wasn't that she didn't believe in people, or that she was some sort of closet pessimist. Kara knew that the world and those in it always had to potential to do good, be better. And she was an alien with superpowers on this planet, she did want to help. To honour her family, to honour her purpose. Some purpose. She'd lost the only thing she'd come to Earth to do, arriving too late to raise the boy she, a child, was supposed to raise. All that responsibility thrust upon her as she was thrown to the whims of a fate far away from a people, a culture, a history, a world and a family that burned. She could see it behind her eyelids, any night, every night since she landed. The scars of that pain reached across the universe, etched forever into her like a brand. Marking her the last true bastion of Krypton. 

People in her life thought she wore everything on her face, felt that she was unable to hide her feelings. They thought that, because surely she had to be that way, with the weight of the biggest secret ever that sat in her heart. They thought that because unquestionably all the honest, say it all and let it land, had to be the balance to something, so earth-shattering. They thought that because that's what Kara wanted them to believe. A mask that she wore that had been there so long, Kara wasn't actually sure where her own face began anymore. It was a truth, of sorts, a reflection of her. But Kara was like an iceberg, and even the secret that she was Supergirl, lay above the water of everything dark beneath.

Kara was thirteen years old when she saw her parents for the last time. The last threads of innocence snapped the second the glass to pod closed, and the sounds of a planet dying disappeared, and all she was left with was her own breathing and the pounding of her heart.

So many times she'd asked herself, how come she survived. Why her. It wasn't even a question, really, but a prayer. A prayer to radioactive chunks and a sun no telescope could find. It was a lament. 

She shouldn't hate Clark. She shouldn't hate him, but she couldn't stop himself. He was as much a part of her as she was of him. But he was just an echo, to be a Kryptonian was so much more. A sum of knowledge, a code, a shared history, shared suffering. Only it was gone now, all of it. Gone forever.

Kara Zor-El was nice.

Kara Danvers was terrified.

And then, when that one bullet killed her whole world again, Kara Danvers was screaming.

* * *

Her collar itched. 

You'd think a two-thousand dollar suit's collar wouldn't itch, but it was one of many little things that she had learned being in a relationship with Lena Luthor. 

Maybe her collar itched because the dry cleaners knew she was an alien in disguise and thought the way to help her escape the clutches of a Luthor was by causing severe skin irritation. 

Maybe it was because she had rushed through the measurements, a call to contain an apartment fire, and Lena's tailor thought to punish her for evading pins in with tight collars. 

Or maybe her collar itched because she was distinctly and supremely nervous about being an hour late to the gala that Lena had been planning for months. 

Of course, one benefit to being able to fly was avoiding valet parking, so that shaved off at least ten minutes, though it did nothing to ease her anxiety. Almost hitting a pigeon on the way here didn't help, spitting out feathers was probably not the look she was supposed to have going for her.

From the moment that Lena turned up at her door that night, a racing confession pouring out of her and putting Kara's excessive wordiness to shame, she had existed in what felt like a higher plane of being. Maybe their first kiss should have made things more awkward, rather than less; but it didn't. Kara couldn't pinpoint precisely why, but later figured it had something to do with actually making a choice to move forward with this, rather than feeling thrown into it – even if she had no real idea what she was moving forward into. In any case, the week after had passed without strangeness between her and Lena. They did their jobs, were as friendly and as they'd ever been over text, and reignited the friendship they'd been on track for months before their argument. The only really different thing was the occasional eye contact that extended just a fraction longer than it may have used to when they were together, or maybe the difference was they were both looking at each other at the same time. The brief but meaningful smiles they exchanged before that contact was broken.

Kara's heart bloomed with pride at seeing the room so full, her eyes trailing over the crowd of beautifully dressed and sparkly men and women. Her ears honed in on the heartbeat she had spent nearly a year folding into herself like new muscle memory, from the very first night the had collapsed into each other. 

Kara was kidding herself, of course, she'd been memorising it since the moment they'd first met. 

Her breath caught in her throat when she found her, and it took all her self control not to break the laws of physics and appear instantly by Lena's side, mouth-watering. The dark dress curved around her like water, the black sapphires weaved into the bodice shining under the low-level lights of the room. Kara's fingers itched to touch them, the strange magpie-like tendency she'd had since she'd arrived on Earth flaring in her chest. Lena's eyes found her's across the room before Kara could move an inch regardless, an arched eyebrow and an appreciative look raking over her. 

Kara was definitely by her side quicker than the DEO would like.

"I'm so sorry I'm late," Kara hummed in her ear.

Lena's head tilted slightly in her direction, her jawline distracting Kara before she looked back to the couple she was talking to and thanking them for their contribution. After they walked off, Lena's hand found Kara's elbow and pulled her away from the main crowd and toward the dance floor. Before Kara could protest, Lena had already cajoled her into a slow dance, her arms wrapping around Kara's neck as they began to sway.

"Don't worry," Lena finally answered, her smile assuaging Kara's nervousness. "It's fashionable. You ok?"

Kara shrugged, trying to time her feet correctly and avoid Lena's toes.

"Yeah, barely touched me."

Lena's nails scraped her skin gently, the action drawing Kara's attention back to her face. Instead of a smile now, Lena's face was shadowed with worry. She was the most elegant woman in this room, and of all the people who she could give her attention too, she was giving it to Kara. 

"That's not what they're saying on the news," Lena said cautiously, quietly, her green eyes still tracking the movements on Kara's face.

"Do you have Supergirl on google alert?" Kara said cheerily, deflecting. "You know that I write half those articles."

_'Can you believe that she's dating a journalist?'_

Kara struggled not to turn her head in the direction of the words her ears had picked up, something she was better at after the third public date Lena had taken her on.

"I know," Lena rolled her eyes. "That's why I read them."

Kara smirked.

"You're such a liar."

The muscles in Lena's arms relaxed slightly, Kara feeling the shift through her hands. 

"Guilty," Lena teased, her voice turning sultry and the corner of her mouth twitched upwards. "You know, I hear whoever organised this thing ordered potstickers."

_'God, and so soon after her wife.'_

Kara's anger rankled, and she took a mental breath and counted down from ten internally as she replied.

"From Happy's?" She asked, injecting enthusiasm into her voice.

Fortunately, her real obsession with her favourite restaurant, possible health code violations and all, seemed to cover up if she fell short. She'd taken Lena there on their first date, and much to Lena's credit, she hadn't commented on the rickety chairs, the napkins shoved under the table legs to keep them level, or the way the owner knew Kara so well that he asked about her attempts to organise free doughnuts at work. 

"Unfortunately," Lena answered dryly. "Jason's hole in the wall didn't allow for over four hundred people."

Kara bit back a laugh.

"Oh well," she pouted. "I'm sure whoever you got will be ok."

Lena sighed, shaking her head.

"You're such a pain in the ass."

_'Come on, that's hardly fair.'_

"I know," Kara did laugh now. "Guilty."

"Lena Luthor!"

Kara winced at the loud call, Lena immediately stiffened in her arms and let out a groan, stopping their dance.

"Oh, no."

"Oh, no what?" Kara questioned, turning her head in the direction of the caller, zoning in on a rather eccentrically dressed grey-haired woman, pushing through the crowd and waving enthusiastically in their direction.

"Watt," Lena muttered.

"What?"

"No," Lena hissed, turning them both to face the incoming woman, linking her arm with Kara's. "That's Karen Watt. My fifth-grade teacher. She was obsessed with my father."

Kara was still confused.

"Ok?"

"And she's the most inappropriate person on the planet," Lena whispered quickly. "But I can't afford to piss her off, because she's now the headmistress of a private school that all the board's kids and grandkids go to."

Kara blinked and opened her mouth to answer, but her head turned again at another conversation.

_'At least the last one was a CFO. Honestly, a magazine writer?'_

She could feel a headache coming on.

"When you say 'inappropriate' what do you me-"

"Lena!" The woman was upon them, throwing herself into their personal space, planting air kisses on both of Lena's cheeks, and entirely ignoring Kara's presence. "I haven't seen you since you were a little girl!"

Immediately, a mask of chilly welcome dropped over Lena's face, and she returned the older woman's welcome with a small deferential nod.

"Hello, Mrs Watt," she answered politely, digging her nails into Kara's skin when she opened her mouth to butt into the conversation.

She closed it, and the older woman continued to ignore her. 

Kara felt her annoyance rising. 

"How are you, Lena, dear?" The woman cooed.

"I'm doing well, Mrs Watt."

"I hear you're thriving as the CEO of your family's company."

Kara teeth grated at the apparent jab and her spine stiffened. A natural urge to defend Lena grinding the back of her brain. Part of the reasons she hated these functions was the evident fake sincerity that all these rich people displayed. Kara knew logically that they weren't all bad. When she wasn't hovering by Lena's side and actually ventured out on her own, she'd occasionally hone in on an interesting conversation and make her way over and try to join it.

But ever since Alex's death, Kara's emotions had been in constant flux. Pinging back and forth between sadness and rage at the world. Things were better now, more settled, but the personality she'd shifted into was here to stay apparently. The brackets of it were less extreme for sure though, because otherwise, she might have launched Mrs Nosy Watt and her fur coat through the ceiling. 

"It's my company now, Mrs Watt."

Kara rolled her eyes, wondering how Lena managed to keep calm, even though a part of her envied it.

"Yes, of course," the woman breezed through, flapping her hands slightly. "It must have been difficult taking it over after all that nonsense with your brother. How is Lex?"

Surely a vein in Kara's forehead must be throbbing by now. Few things ate her more then people's constantly comparing Lena to her terrorist brother, but to dare to ask Lena for information about the man, as if they still met up for Sunday brunch, made her more upset. And even though Lena was well practised in the art of indifference, Kara knew her well enough to know that she'd been struck by the old goat's comment.

_'Well, she's always been the black sheep. The CFO had a kid, remember?'_

Kara was rapidly staring to hate this party.

"Still in prison," Lena answered, her voice a millimetre tighter.

"Yes, such a pity. He was so gifted as a child."

Kara's eyes narrowed at the older woman. Lena may berate her later for her rudeness, but Kara's tolerance for this woman was shot. Kara opened her mouth to snap something, preferably an expletive, but before she could, another voice drew her attention.

_'Insanity always ran strong in that family.'_

The speed she turned her head to level her glare on someone else, Kara was surprised she didn't break her neck. The only thing that stopped her from burning them to a crisp with her heat vision was the knowledge that Lena wouldn't be able to get her deposit from the venue back. 

"Yes," Lena answered cooly. "A pity."

Kara turned her frown back to Lena, worried at her increased heart-rate. Was she angry too? Or upset? Or maybe just nerve-wracked? Even after all her years on Earth, Kara still had problems differentiating the nuances of human emotions. But her fingers itched to soothe, to help—some sort of tactile grounding that would relax Lena. Enforced boundaries were highlighted in her brain, and she promised herself that she would save her need to calm for later. 

"You know I met your mother at a museum opening in Metropolis last week. Lillian was telling me she's going to Europe for the holidays this year, are you going too?"

One more. One more comment and Kara knew she wouldn't be able to stop herself from killing this woman.

"No, Mrs Watt," Lena's voice was notably colder now, enough for even the obliviously cruel Mrs Watt to notice apparently, if her startled expression was to be believed. "I'm spending the holidays with my family and friends in National City."

Kara felt some grim satisfaction when the woman finally acknowledged her presence but shifted uncomfortably at the feeling of being examined under a microscope.

_'So she likes picking up strays.'_

Kara winced but opened her mouth to introduce herself with some attempt at politeness, but the woman blustered over her before she could.

"Ah yes, Joanna Tucker told me that you were a homosexual, but I always suspected." 

Inappropriate or disgusting, Kara wondered.

"I remember the love-hearts you used to draw for little Cindy Ryan. This must be your wife."

Kara's mind went blank, a pit in her stomach swallowing up all her annoyance, anger and upset. Her instant reaction was to reassure Lena, but Lena answered in that unflappable way of her's, her heart not even skipping a beat.

"I'm afraid that my wife passed away a few years ago, this is my girlfriend Kara."

Even as Lena said it, the words sounded odd, and Kara felt a pang in her chest. She hadn't distanced Sam's death like that before. Not so casually.

But then, how was Lena supposed to label herself now, Kara wondered? Maybe it had been easier before. Single, partner, wife, widow. She was still a widow because Sam was still gone, but now she was with Kara, so she was also a girlfriend again? Two identities in one whole? Daring to define herself by her current relationship instead of her former one felt strange when it wasn't a divorce that separated Kara and Sam. It was death. Kara felt a little weird Lena was describing herself as anything at all. 

Maybe this was why people remarried when their wives died. Ending the chapter firmly with the stroke of a pen on a new bit of paper. That way they were a spouse again and nobody questioned further, least of all Kara. 

Kara's mouth dried up suddenly. Married? Wives?

Rao, they'd only been together five minutes, and this was what she was thinking about? What was wrong with her?

_'I think they look nice together.'_

Maybe it was the way that Lena's hand curled and rested on her hip, or the way Mrs Who or Why or whatever her name was, was looking at them and gapping like a fish. Maybe Kara should be satisfied that she had finally run out of things to say, but didn't she have anything else to look at?

Kara bit her cheek to stop her lip from curling into a snarl, and before she could snap her in half, Lena was already saying their goodbyes. 

"It was great to see you again, Mrs Watt."

Lena pulled Kara away from the still shocked woman, weaving through the party guests with practised ease until she found a quiet corner to stop. 

"I thought you were going to blow up her head!" Lena exclaimed, laughter in her voice before she frowned at whatever look must be glued on Kara's face. "Don't worry, she didn't upset me when she brought up Sam."

Kara blinked, her spiralling thoughts finally landing on what Lena had said. 

Actually, she hadn't thought at all that the comment about Sam would have upset Lena. It hadn't even occurred to her, and the fact that it hadn't caused a wellspring of guilt to erupt in her.

"Oh, yeah…" She stumbled, shaking her head slightly like she was trying to clear its ringing. "Are you ok?"

Lena smiled, her eyes sparkling as her face softened.

"I'm fine," she gentled reassuring. "Really."

Kara tried to smile in return, but it felt weak. She did manage to relax some though when Lena reached up, tracing Kara's cheek and threaded a loose strand of Kara's hair back behind her ear. Her fingers lingered, cupping Kara's face and Kara felt her anxiety ebb.

_'Shameless.'_

She closed her eyes at the stab, before drawing on a reserve of strength she'd cultivated ever since Alex died. 

Kara opened her eyes.

"I'm just so happy that you're here with me," Lena's fingers traced down now, catching the corner of her mouth and lingering a little too long to be appropriate. "Thank you."

It should be enough. It should have swelled in her heart like a balloon, the same way it had the first time that Lena had said it. It should have banished all the doubt and the unease and the tension that was constricting Kara's heart because Kara knew that Lena meant it. She meant it with every fibre of herself because Lena would never say it otherwise. Lena had come so far since they had first met, she'd worked so hard to re-piece herself, laying a new foundation after the old one had cracked, and here was Kara, unsteady and unsure and unable to find the words to say it.

Not for the first time, Kara wondered if she was good enough for Lena. If tonight was anything to go by, she had a distinct impression that she wasn't. 

"You're welcome."

At least she meant that.

* * *

Kara liked it, the sweat cooling on her skin under the glow of red light. She liked the feeling of it, partly because she had never gotten to experience it, or the same pull of exertion in her muscles before she had met Lena. But mostly because it was usually preceded by the most emotionally and physically tangling ecstasy of sex with Lena Luthor.

Which made the fact that she was still only a few steps gone from tension, and the headache she was holding had only worsened since they had stumbled through her door together, clothes pooling at their feet while they laughed against each other's lips in a rush to get to the bed. Kara had been very much invested at the start, in all honesty, she had been preoccupied with the thought of it since Lena's mouth had found her neck in the car on the way back from the gala. She couldn't quite pinpoint the exact moment when a part of her mind assuredly became not one-hundred per cent committed to it, which unnerved her slightly because who in their right mind would not be one-hundred per cent committed to sex with Lena. Still, one-hundred per cent committed she had not been. 

And now, their legs still tangled and Kara's heart still pounding, with Lena's hand still splayed against her naked chest, Kara's thoughts had only grown more distracted. She couldn't get all the nasty words of the people at the gala out of her head, or Lena's own statement of fact.

_My wife passed away a few years ago, this is my girlfriend._

She wished it could be easier, which only made her feel worse. Because after everything, how easy could it really be? Lena so open and willing and soul-baring with her, something she wasn't with anyone else, something that when Kara was sane, she would have recognised for the absolute gift it was, but now couldn't even hold onto as reassuring. 

It was so unfair. 

"You ok?"

Clearly, Kara was doing an excellent job at hiding her distractedness, which was to say, not at all. She turned her head to look down slightly at Lena, who was watching her with curious eyes, with enough probing behind them for Kara's stomach to swirl.

Maybe red sunlight and human emotions weren't all they were cracked up to be. 

"Yeah."

"You sure?"

Kara bit her lip, regulated her breathing and tried to relax into the mattress. She traced her hand over Lena's against her chest, down her inner arm until she reached the curve of her elbow. Admiring the way the soft skin felt when she didn't have to hold back her strength for a few seconds before her eyes returned to Lena's and she gave a slow nod. 

Lena didn't seem appeased if anything she looked more concerned.

"Why didn't you let me touch you?" She asked cautiously. "Really touch you? Is it a control thing? I just think we should talk about it. You seemed… distant, at the end."

Kara tried not to sigh, but she looked back up at the ceiling, tracing the white paint and the shadows cast by the red light. She wondered if this is the way things would look on Krypton if she and Lena were there now. The knowledge that she had been on Earth long enough to actually forget what different colours looked like cast under it had made her cry last month. The day after she told Lena and then came home from work to find the CEO sitting cross-legged on her bed, red lamps turned on, and a pile of paint colour swatches spread across the duvet. An evening spent taking them all in. In the end, Kara had only really wanted to memorise one colour. Kara now knew that if Lena was on Krypton, the green of her eyes would shine with fire. 

"I didn't mean to be," her hoarse voice betrayed her, Kara's tongue feeling dry and swollen in her mouth. "It's not a control thing."

"Are you worried about something?"

Kara swallowed, though it felt like dry sandpaper, and tried to summon some moisture to her mouth. Not wanting the silence to linger into the uncomfortable, Kara answered in a quiet voice filled with exhaustion.

"No, I'm just… It's been a long day."

Lena turned on her side, propping her head up on against the pillow, her hair unimaginably straight, so she could stare down at Kara with probing eyes and a wry smile on her lips.

"Yeah, I imagine being thrown through buildings would do that."

Lena's hand lifted from her chest then, tracing her fingertips between Kara's breasts, along her collarbone and down the skin of her arm. Gently, gently, as if she was touching fragile stained glass. Kara felt her nerves burn from the touch, and she felt a weird and confusing wave of guilt. 

"I'm sorry."

It came out more choked than she wanted it too as if she was actually begging for sympathy, but Lena didn't seem to take it that way. Her eyes remained soft, and the smile still remained on her lips.

"Don't be sorry," she continued to trace her hand. "You're not a machine. You're only, well not human, but Kryptonian. I just hope you know that whatever's going on, you can tell me."

Kara wanted to. She wanted to be able to tell Lena about all that she heard from the crowd when they were together tonight. She tried to tell her how much her gut had twisted inside at her and Sam's meanings to Lena juxtaposed to each other. She wanted to spill it all out on the sheets between them, but she couldn't. Because she feared that once she did, there would only be space between them, and no more room for any happy truths. 

"I know," she said instead. "Thank you."

Kara sometimes wondered if Lena really was as perceptive as she seemed to be. For all her ability to pick up on the subtle nuances of people, and all of Kara's obviousness, she appeared to accept Kara's lying words on her feelings far too quickly. But then maybe it was because she just wanted to believe it was true. 

"You know," Lena's tone turned breathier, her eyes darker and her hand still traced. "I don't think it ever occurred to me that one day I'd be developing red sun tech for the purpose of the bedroom."

Kara didn't answer for a beat, her thoughts still battling, before a quiet desire for closeness one out.

"Doesn't affect my stamina though."

Lena captured Kara's mouth in a deep kiss at that, as if she had to test Kara's words with her tongue, and Kara couldn't move. Couldn't think. Couldn't breathe, until she pulled back for air. She reached out and took hold of Kara's left hand next. Guiding it slowly underneath the sheets, watching Kara's face the entire time. When she slid the hand through the first brush of coarser hair, Kara watched enthralled as Lena gasped softly and closed her eyes for several seconds.

She was so very wet. Kara's breath came in shallow bursts. She moved her fingers slightly, and Lena gasped again, louder this time, and tightened her grip on Kara's wrist. 

"As a scientist, I think I need to collect more evidence," she whispered.

A thrill ran down Kara's spine at the breathy desire in her voice, the almost desperate look in her eyes. All her distractions, heck all her other thoughts, melted away. She rolled herself half on top of Lena, room to go deeper and watch Lena's eyes dilate as Kara's blonde curls fell over them both like a curtain, locking them away from the rest of the world.

"Well, by all means," she watched Lena's back stiffen as she rolled her hand. "Collect away."

They began again. Hours later, the darkness in the room gradually gave away to the moonlight, spilling like cool shadows across the sheets with Lena curled in her arms, Kara's insecurities rose once again. And despite assurances to herself, her sleep was fitful, and in her dreams, she got lost in a dark maze where no direction felt safe.

* * *

Kara knew she shouldn't feel this exhausted in the morning. Usually, she rose with the sun, and given her cells metabolic rate, it's rays saturated her cells and literally made her the ultimate morning person. Of course, science could only go so far, and feelings of inadequacy, well they were hard to shake. Brain fog and all, Kara may have cheated slightly in her morning routine, speeding through it while Lena was perched on a stool at the kitchen island, watching her, quite literally, zoom about. A cup of coffee in her hands, with steam dancing through the air, her hair curling slightly and wearing Kara's NCU sweatshirt, that should have been a site to stop Kara in her tracks. Her mind, and x-ray vision, were far too focused on locating some breakfast in her poorly stocked kitchen.

"I must have tired you out last night," Lena's voice balanced over with amusement. "You look exhausted."

"Apparently," Kara said distractedly, grabbing the box of cereal, shaking it to see how much was left. "I'm a light sleeper."

She wasn't. She slept messily, legs akimbo and fingers twisted in the sheets, face flushed and focused on the serious task of sleeping. It was the sleep of the determined. 

Normally, though.

Whatever that was.

Kara poured out two mismatched bowls of cornflakes for them, nearly overfilling on the milk and handed Lena a quickly washed and still dripping spoon. Without any preamble, Kara dug in. At least one thing remained constant, despite all her other issues. Kara was always hungry.

It was only when she was down to the last spoonful that Kara noticed that Lena wasn't actually eating. She looked up to see Lena staring at her, spoon hovering with an amused smile. Kara instinctively wiped her face, checking to see if something was on her face.

"You're amazing."

Kara blinked at that, her eyebrows crinkling.

"I made your cereal," she answered slowly, wondering if she was missing something.

Lena half shrugged, tapping the spoon against the rim.

"It's a beautiful bowl of cereal."

Kara looked at the cereal, then back to Lena's face, then back at the bowl again. She wondered briefly when she had become this person, the opposite of small gestures. The opposite of appreciation of what she was being given. When she had become the one unable to reach out and Lena the one that glowed with it. 

Great, Jealousy, and over what? Happiness? It clung to her like a stink.

She dipped her head in appreciation of the comment, holding a smile. Holding and holding and pretending she wasn't a mess. Quickly, she needed to distract herself.

"Your trip to Japan's on Friday, right?"

Kara moved her bowl to the sink as she said it, before checking the time on her watch with a frown. She had a week ahead of her, and with Lena's planned weekend in Tokyo, she'd be spending the weekend at Lena's with Ruby, not that the teenage thought she needed supervision. In fact, Kara was convinced that Ruby hadn't even gone to stay with a friend last night, and instead stayed at the apartment. Kara would know instantly if her emergency cookie stock was depleted. 

"Yes," Lena responded, breaking through Kara's distraction. "Planes, ugh."

Like a cold press, that single sentence shooed out all the other fester, at least for now. Kara knew it wasn't healthy, her therapist told her repeatedly, but she functioned best when she was trying to fix things for others. To solve their problems. To protect. Something about having her formative years raised in stress meant that her functionally barometer only steadied when things were going wrong instead of right. Even if the whole thing only ended up hurting her more, then it helped. And with Lena, it was an inbuilt, hardwired desire to protect her. From any and all harm or distress. Including from herself.

"Be faster if I flew you." The offer came from her so easily that she didn't even have to consider it because, of course, she would. Lena could ask her for the moon, and Kara would bring it to her, breathing her very soul into it so Lena could know she alone kept it.

So unhealthy.

"That's one way to out your identity."

Kara felt her adrenaline stutter and spike at the same time, but Lena wasn't looking at her, asking anything at all with her eyes. Not the way she used to when they were pouring things out of themselves like those damn colour swatches, seeing things and saying things that couldn't share with anyone else. Kara had been desperate for one person to really understand, another mirror to reflect her own grief back to her, and unhealthy or not, it was like Lena had been sent for her that day. Someone to soul-bear. But now Kara was at the point when she couldn't even share it with Lena because it was about Lena.

And Lena was lighthearted now and waiting for an answer, Rao she wasn't stupid and would soon realise that all these long pauses before Kara could reply meant something. 

Kara let herself be unbalanced once more, slightly fake and mixing with honest affection. She walked around the counter until she was in front of Lena, a foot away and enough to take in every inch of her, trying to let the gentle warmth that should be this morning press onto her heart.

"Supergirl does get on great with Lena Luthor," she teased out with a cocky grin.

Lena's eye's sparked, and she hummed in reply, her voice dropping, low and gravelly. 

"Does she give any other sort of favours?"

Kara remembered vividly the day she and Lena had first met. She remembered it all. Kara had always wondered about the headstone next to Alex's, but she hadn't wondered that hard beyond the fact that there never seemed to be any token of remembrance. For all she knew, whoever was visiting just came on different days to her, even though during that first month, Kara was there every day. Everyday.

But Lena, that day, was a lightning bolt.

"You know," she felt a little hot all of a sudden. "When I first met you I would never have guessed you had a hero kink."

Lena laughed, the sound allowing for the cracks to form in Kara's torturous brain.

"Well," she waved a hand vaguely. "Layers."

No waiting for an answer, Lena gracefully pulled Kara's body into her, between her legs in a strange mix of eroticism and gentle… something. Hands resting on Kara's hips, she stroked small circles, and Kara fought with her heart to stop a sigh from escaping.

She definitely didn't win when Lena's hand shifted from her hips to the row of buttons, closing her shirt. From the bottom up, she slowly opened them, her eyes locked on Kara's and the circles not stopping but defiantly moving in new directions.

"Tomorrow night," Lena had almost reached her collar now. "Ruby's sleeping over at a friend's house again. Big assignment due."

Then it was loose, the shirt open, revealing her stomach, her skin, the gap between her breasts. Lena was trailing her fingers down now, pads dancing lightly, playing at the seams and teasing to open more, take off.

"Meaning what?" Kara answered, breathless and not really registering her own voice.  
  


"Life with a teenager," Lena answered, misunderstanding what Kara was asking apparently. "It's not very romantic."

  
Kara groaned when her fingers stopped their ministrations, and as quickly as she could without breaking them, she grabbed Lena's hands. Refocusing her eyes properly, she realised that Lena was looking at her with an even smugger smile. 

Not misunderstood at all, apparently. 

"No, this is nice," Kara answered, returning Lena's fingers to where that belonged. "It's nice."

Lena traced her hands further up Kara's body again, splaying them against the taut pull of her shoulder muscles. Kara felt like she was a stained wire about to snap. Slowly, easing, Lena stood, pressing her entire body against Kara's and removing Kara's shirt in the same motion.

"Nice, hmm," Lena continued lowly, her mouth hot on Kara's collarbone, and struggled for a few seconds to get the sleeves off her arms completely. "Good way to describe it."

Kara felt her now ice thin resistance evaporate completely, she wondered if it had even been there at all. Now it was her turn to take control, she pushed Lena back faster then she would have liked until her back hit the bench. Not taking her eyes of Lena's darkening one's, she lifted her onto the counter's edge. 

"You're going to be late for work," she husked, drawing her eyes and her hands down to the hem of the sweatshirt she was wearing, sitting bunched slightly now on Lena's bare leg. "I'm going to be."

It was easy to lift Lena slightly again, especially when Lena's fingers were now weaved in her hair. Kara could hear every beat of her heart, every rushed breath of air leaving her lungs, and it rocketed her faster to desire then anything else could. 

"You could just fly me," Lena answered, spreading her legs.

Kara smiled at her, feeling delightful salacious now.

"I don't want you thinking I'm that easy."

She bent her head, Lena gasped, and the fingers in her hair tightened.

* * *

Kara loved National City. 

She loved it in a way that she hadn't loved any other place she'd ever lived, Argo included. Maybe it was because this was her choice, her place to live that wasn't dictated by birth or which family she was given to. She ached for Krypton, she missed Midvale when she wasn't there, but National City had her heart. 

And the best way to see this city was from up high, flying over the cityscape and taking in the sight of millions of people. All the lights, all the windows, and behind every one of them a story. Some happy, some sad. All connected. 

"Ok, so you're officially my favourite. You ever thought about opening up a side business, skydiving where you're the parachute?"

Kara looked over to Ruby, happily swinging her feet on the edge of the building where they sat, eating her ice cream and sunglasses perched on her nose. She briefly calculated how long they could be here before Ruby got burned and wondered if she had put on sunscreen like Lena had asked. Would it be too creepy for Kara to check by smelling?

"No, that would be an abuse of power," Kara answered with a grin, eating her own cone and revelling at the mint chip flavour. "Good idea, though."

Kara was always good with children. And she liked them, and they liked her. When she was on Krypton, still a child herself, the little ones tended to swarm her whenever they attended public meetings or the temple. They liked her golden hair, a rarity on Krypton, and the way she always managed to make the grumpiest councillors smile. They pulled at her clothes, hoping for sweets and asking her opinion on the art they'd made that week. Kara had a whole shelf in her bedroom that had been filled with trinkets. From the hopefuls to the science guild with their compressed star maps and spliced DNA sequencing, to the sharp and primitive-looking arrowheads from those already assigned to the military guild. So much potential and the entire direction of their lives laid out for them before they were ten. Kara supposed that was why she liked the children of Earth. For sure, there were many whose circumstances dictated their lives, but their desire to dream, to be different, wasn't hindered in their imagination. Though she'd be fooling herself in thinking that the more privileged weren't given more opportunities. 

She supposed that was one of the things that she really enjoyed about being Supergirl. Hope, help and compassion for all. She really did mean that. For all. 

And children, well, helping children always good.

Ruby most of all. The teenager whose character had Kara wanting to be a better person every single day of her life. It wasn't strange to say that she'd fallen in love with the girl more every single day she spent with her. Some mix of inherent goodness, morality and sense of self, combined with the anxiety of the unknown. Someone whose parents had armed her with every tool they could for life before her. A roll of an ever unfurling personality. 

Kara would die for this girl.

"So… what's up?" Ruby asked, eyeing her with a grin, probably sensing Kara's contemplation. "The last time you picked me up from school-"

"I pick you up from school every week."

"-and then took me to get ice-cream-"

"We always have ice-cream on Thursdays!"

"-and then took me flying-"

"You like the high windspeed!"

"Kara! Jeez," Ruby shouted, half her ice cream dripping onto her knee. With a semi-disgusted look, that was definitely all Lena, she wiped it away with her thumb and flicked down onto some poor unsuspecting soul below.

Kara scratched at her chin, feeling slightly abashed, but unsure how to approach the subject. A suspicious part of her was convinced Lena had some way of listening in on all the conversations Ruby and Kara had that were about her, somehow knowing whenever they wanted to surprise her with something before they even knew what they were surprising her with. But Lena's birthday was coming up next week, and she never celebrated it or marked the occasion. Kara was trying to figure out the perfect way to toe the line between respecting Lena's choice, which was immensely tricky considering Kara thought a birthday should be separated for at least a week, and wanting to acknowledge the moment. 

"Sorry," she finally replied with a wince, wondering if the dollop had landed on somebody, they'd think that a bird had poohed on them. "Look, I've thought that maybe next week-"

"Ok, I can't keep it in anymore," Ruby suddenly cut in, with a rambling excitement that Kara usually reserved for herself. "Lena's going to ask you to move in."

Kara blinked, convinced she'd misheard.

"Wait, what?"

"I wasn't supposed to find out." The words spilled out of Ruby now, she was positively vibrating with excitement. "But when she gets nervous about something, she starts sleep talking about her upcoming presentations, and when she fell asleep on the couch last week, she was basically holding a stockholder meeting about the benefits of splitting costs when you share an apartment."

Kara's brain could barely perform essential functions right now, in fact, for a few seconds, she really did forget how to breathe. Bullet points tried to arrange in her mind, somehow to figure out what had just been said.

"Isn't she a billionaire?" Was all she could manage.

Ruby rolled her eyes.

"The point is, she wants you to move in!" She rushed once more, still beaming. "How awesome is that!"

Awesome? Maybe, Kara thought. Perhaps it was excellent, and it was exactly what she wanted, some sort of confirmation. A physical assurance that Lena was committed. But it's not what she really wanted. In fact, it terrified her.

"Yeah, no that's…" 

Ruby's smile turned to a frown at Kara's trailed off words, and Kara rushed to say something, anything.

"Maybe Lena should've told me herself, though."

Ruby looked embarrassed now as if she'd stumbled over something she shouldn't have.

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"No," Kara answered quickly, trying to reassure. "Don't be sorry."

Ruby didn't answer, but her feet had stopped swinging now, and she stared down at the considerable distance between them and the ground. She'd always shown such fearlessness. Her heart never pounding above an excited rate when Kara took her flying, or when she perched like this on the verge of the drop. It was either a huge mark of trust in Kara's powers, or she was just overwhelmingly confident. Kara had always liked to believe that it was a mix of both. 

"Don't you want to move in with us?"

The thought that she was disappointing Ruby with her lack of enthusiasm was distressing, even though the idea that Ruby wanted her to live with them was heartwarming. It all mixed together into a cocktail of regret, thrown into the fire that was her panicked reluctance.

"Ruby," she answered gently, in a way that she knew all children hated adults to talk like, but she couldn't do this any other way. "I should really talk to Lena about this first."

Ruby nodded, and she didn't hide the upset in her eyes, though she never said it aloud. 

* * *

Sometimes she wished she didn't have any memories of Krypton. Maybe then she'd be like Clark... maybe then she wouldn't miss it so much.

Kara thinks a lot about her perfect world. She thinks about that black mercy, holding her in its grip and conjuring up a fantasy of what she needed to be happy. She thought about the ease of it all, her mother, her father, Clark the way he should have been to her. But most of all, she thought about how Alex had risked her life to save her. To tell her that she wished it could be real for her, but a life without pain or loss could never be real. Because it was a part of who she was, and that was what made her want to help people. To stop them from struggling the way that she had. But that Alex couldn't choose it for her, that she had to pick it for herself.

She had clung to that every day since Alex had died. But nothing had ever really made the ghosts go away. Some days she woke up and wanted to change the world. Others, she just wanted to break that same world in two. But most of the time, she just had to get on with the business of living. 

Kara didn't know how she would die, she shouldn't know that. But still, she was ok with it. Knowing that everyone else would die too, that was far more difficult. They all would. Everyone was so small. But was she going to have to watch more people die knowing she wasn't fast enough or couldn't get to them in time?

"So I guess I've been doing better this week. We had our first big event without him, Mom handled it pretty well, and my ex even came over to spend the day with us. My father always loved him."

The man who was speaking to the circle looked down at his feet, and Kara knew that pause all too well. It was the moment you tried to take for yourself before you completely fell apart. 

At first, she'd flown out into the atmosphere to cry. It was next to impossible to feel like she had any real privacy in a city where she could hear everyone with super-hearing. In space, no one could ever hear her grieve. Her tears would boil, then instantly freeze in the vacuum—no evidence of weeping for anyone to see.

When being alone didn't work, and she still couldn't stand being among her friends, she came here instead.

"I hope that I'm getting to the point where I can start to move forward again in my life," the man managed to continue, his eyes red as he spoke to the circle of people sitting in chairs. "I know that parents dying is the natural course, and I feel weak for this having hit me so hard, but I just… I'm tired."

Rao, weren't they all?

"Grief isn't easy," the unofficial leader of the group answered when the man stopped speaking, clearly unable to continue. "But it's something we all have to go through at some point in our lives. Be proud of where you're at. Recovery isn't linear. Kara, we haven't seen you in a while, how have you been?"

She started at the sound of her name, and all the eyes that turned to her expectantly. Truthfully, even though it had always eased something in her to come here after Alex died, it had always felt more like a bandaid solution than anything permanent. A grief circle of morbidity, which seemed to frown on any of the dark humour she had developed. It all seemed to want to sand down her newly revealed spiky edges, and that was something she flinched from. There wasn't a lot that was great in her life in the period between the death and meeting Lena, but a comforting sense of moroseness was always a steady thing, and she'd never really wanted it taken away from her. Knowing others, leaning on others who loved you was supposed to divide grief and double joy, but Kara struggled with it the second time around. 

"I've been good," she started to speak after the long pause turned into a slightly uncomfortable one. Her fingers twisted with themselves, anxious turning for something to do. "Um, as some of you know," she nodded to some faces she remembered. "I lost my sister nearly two years ago now, but I've been doing well." 

I've been doing well—what a stupid thing to say.

"I'm in a relationship now," the word popping out of her and feeling somewhat false on her tongue. "It's been good." 

Kara felt hot now, and even though nobody had said anything, and it definitely was all in her own mind, she felt the edge of disbelief.

"I mean, it's been a bit… odd," she mumbled, frowning at the floor. "She's a widow," Kara explained. "It took her a long time to work through it, not that she's done working through it!" 

Here she went again, unable to shut up once she got started, which was precisely why she hadn't wanted to talk. It wasn't something she could cure. Something that could be worked through like a particularly tricky science experiment.

"I mean, like you said, it isn't linear," nodding towards the defacto leader in acknowledgment. "It'll always be something that… well."

Something that ate away at you. Something that bubbled along with everything that managed to survive like acid. Something that could never really be fixed. You could never conquer it to move on, it walked with you forever. The only thing you could really do was manage it, walk with it and honour the person that you'd lost and take something so terrible and channel it into a force for something good.

"And what about your grief, Kara?"

She was trying to use it to fuel something good. She was trying, but every day lately, she felt like she was coming up short. Kara couldn't frame it the same way, wrap into neatly in a bow and label it when it wasn't just a feeling. It was a feeling that inspired so many other emotions, and so many different feelings inspired it. Some days it felt like a never-ending cycle that she'd never really escape from.

"Well, I miss her." As if it could be summed up as simply as that. "I miss her every day, and that will never stop. But I still talk to her, and Alex is so ingrained in my mind I just know how she'd answer. Except, I don't know how she'd answer this one." 

Kara didn't even really know the question.

"Sorry," she apologised, shaking her head and plastering a wry smile on her face. "I don't mean to hog the hour."

The leader shook their head at her words, and Kara got the uncomfortable feeling that he knew exactly what she wasn't saying.

"You're not hogging. We're all here for each other, here to listen."

The rest of the group nodded or sounded their assent, and it should have made Kara feel better, but like everything these days, it only made her feel worse.

"Yeah, I know," she answered, stumbling slightly over it, unhappy with it. 

"No, I'm fine, I think," she tried to begin again. "As much as anyone is, I guess. I don't feel bad, really I just… I guess there's just been a lot of change, and I'm not sure if I'm really sold on the person that I am now."

The person that she'd always been, maybe. The gutted part of her after everything else had been removed.

"Alex was kind of my balance in life, and even with so much good happening, I still feel… not myself."

The self she should be, wanted to be, needed to be. 

But nobody here could help her do that.

* * *

It was a fun night out, so much so that Kara was exhausted from it in the best way possible. Spontaneity used to be the bread and butter of her young adult life. With a crowd of single friends and the ones that weren't in a relationship with each other, there was always someone willing and ready for a film, or an outdoor exhibit. Someone who wanted to try National City's top ten best hot wing spots. And if none of her friends were up and ready for it, Alex was always there. Probably sighing with exasperation at being dragged along, but enjoying whatever crazy thing they ended up doing all the same. 

Kara found that she needed people around her after she'd arrived on Earth. She'd lost so much anyway, left scrambling with no one else she clung to anyone that threw her a piece of affection. For so long she was viewed as the weird girl until Kenny of course and that had all ended horribly. And yes, she and Alex had finally grown closer. Still, then it really was just her and Alex for so long that by the time she realised that Alex was actually cutting her off from reaching out to anyone else for fear that she would tell anyone else, Kara was once again years behind in the friend-making department. But then she found Winn, and James and Lucy and yes, even Cat in a strange hybrid mentor/parent/friend relationship. People had come, and others went, but for the first time in a long time, she had support, and people that loved her for who she was. Who knew who she was. 

When Alex died, the pin holding it all up crumbled too. Everyone was reaching out at once, the system of support she had built for herself was doing its job, but Kara inexplicably found herself flinching away from it. All she wanted, all she did, was wrap herself in a cocoon of her own pain, baring it like a shield, for the first time with Alex's absence as a new layer. She didn't want to let anyone in anymore, the occasional times she did curing her of ever wanting more. Nobody understood, no matter what they said. No matter what her therapist told her. This pain inside of her wasn't just a past wound. It had been carved at again and again until it formed a system of canyons between every single part of herself, never fully able to connect. 

And nobody understood that, nobody until she met Lena. Someone who's own canyons was as deep as the loss of a world, a sister and herself, all for only one person. Kara was in awe of what a love like that felt like. 

It wasn't a lie to say that Lena had been the reason she got back in contact with her friends. The reason that she demanded herself to get better. To claw her way back to some sense of normalcy. But not for herself, no, but because she saw Lena and knew what she needed. She needed to know that love and friendship still existed. That it existed for her. That someone could get better, from knowing her. That someone could want to be happy, all for her. But for Lena to feel all of that, she could never know the truth. She could never know at all. 

And the real question now, the only one that really mattered was whether they just existed in a state of mutually destructive contentment. Or if somehow, because Kara had pulled away when she should have gotten closer and accepted when she should've stayed away, they had actually filled the edges in each other that everything else had left.

Such heavy thoughts for such a good night, but Kara couldn't stop her mind from drifting there these days. Her fingers played at the uncurling label on the bottle of beer she was drinking, nails scratching and pulling the paper away millimetre by millimetre. She watched the thrum of the bar, watched James frowning as Brainy perfectly and mathematically lined up perfect shot after perfect shot on the pool table. Nia leaning against him, a rosy tint to her cheeks after having one too many. 

But there was always a person missing. One person.

Kara looked over to Lena, sitting opposite her in the booth, also watching the scene around them with a frown. A strange expression in her eyes that made Kara both curious and concerned.

"Are you ok?"

Lena looked over to her, bit her lip for a few seconds before she replied.

"Until you, I didn't even think about being close with anyone else. Sometimes…" 

Kara felt her heart stutter, then sink.

"You feel like you're cheating on her with me?" She asked, resigned.

Lena shook her head.

"No," she replied resoundingly, sorrowfully. She reached across the sticky table and took Kara's hand in her own. "I feel like I'm cheating on you with her. I don't want to cheat on you, Kara. That's why I don't talk about her with you anymore. That's why I remember the important days quietly. I don't want you to be anything less than my priority. It's hard to know where the boundaries are sometimes."

Kara had no idea that Lena had been feeling all of that until now. Maybe she had more things bottled up inside of her too, so much more then she felt ready to share. And Kara knew so much more then she wanted to about blurring boundaries. A part of her wished she could reassure Lena, and say that it was their relationship and no-one else's and they could make their own rules. But that wouldn't be fair, not when Lena had shared and Kara couldn't.

"Yeah," she said instead. "I know." 

Lena sighed, gave Kara a tired smile and squeezed her hand. 

"I wish it was simpler between us. Easier. I'm sorry it's not. I've said it before, but I've only cared about two women in my entire life."

Kara liked her like this. Soft were she was usually hard. Jumpers in place of business suits, loose hair instead of tight styles. Well-worn shoes instead of heels. She was more muted but more alive, like a fall painting hit by sunlight.

"Sam and..?"

It was a tease, and it made her happy to do it, especially when the effect lifted Lena's whole face in a smile.

"Just some blonde girl." Lena arched an eyebrow, snagging Kara's beer from her hand and leaning back into her seat. "Pushy. Cheesy. Makes way too many puns."

Kara watched her take a long sip, their eyes locked.

"Nice," she answered. "She sounds like a babe."

"Oh, yeah," Lena deepened her voice exaggeratedly as if she were a stranger picking her up from a bar. "Do you want to come back to mine after this?"

Kara pretended to contemplate it.

"No. I can't," she answered finally. "Early morning."

For their planned activity to carve pumpkins of course.

Lena snorted.

"Ok."

* * *

Another party that she had no interest in being at. 

This one, in particular, was terrible, most of the people in her somehow being a sample of everyone who complained and insulted Lena, her and their relationship in the cover of a crowd. The press of all them at one event was nauseating as well as giving her a headache, so much so that she had extracted herself from Lena's side and parked herself in a slightly quieter corner. Quieter being the operative word, her hopes dashed when not five minutes after she'd found it, a slick backed haired man swaggered across the room towards her. All smug grinned and stumbling, alcohol on his breath that she smelt a mile off and an apparent ego the size of Jupiter. She begged to anyone that still cared that his beeline towards her was because he had mistaken her for someone else, his sister maybe, of something else, preferably the exit that she would happily redirect him to.

But no, luck was not on her side tonight, and whoever he was slithered beside her, leaning into her space with far too much familiarity and overpowering cologne. 

"God, I hate these things," he bemoaned, his voice as oily as the rest of him. "How about you?"

Kara rolled her eyes but tried not to let her frustration show for Lena's sake. She had told her going into this event that she needed this night to go well. Not that she was warning Kara to behave, because she had no idea how much Kara hated this. But if she wanted to continue holding that particular card to her chest, she was just going to have to redirect her nose slightly to breathe in actual air and silently recite the birth rites of Rao.

"They're ok," she answered, her voice betraying and tight. "But I'm not great with all the people."

It'd be too much to ask that he'd get the hint to leave her alone, but instead, he nodded as if he understood her deeply.

"Fancy dressed snobs, am I right?"

Kara eyed his clearly thousand dollar suit with disgust, the physical embodiment of his entitlement, before shifting up to stare at his leering look. 

"Yeah," she managed, attempting something akin to cordiality. "I guess."

Taking that as an invitation, somehow ignoring all the laws of body language, the man stuck out his hand to introduce himself.

"Morgan Edge."

Kara recalled the name, having listened to it spoken with disgust by Lena frequently. Some prominent real estate developer who made his bank gentrifying neighbourhoods and all but kicking the original residents towards shittier housing that he also owned—the epitome of greed and excess.

And he wanted Kara to shake his hand.

"Kara Danvers," she answered bluntly instead, ignoring it.

He dropped it then, and a distinctly unpleasant expression flickered across his face.

"Oh yeah, your Luthor's date." His words took on a malicious note. "I've definitely heard of you."

Kara clenched her teeth so hard, she was surprised a grinding sound didn't follow. 

"Girlfriend, actually."

He looked her up and down, Kara getting the distinct impression that she was being inspected like a piece of meat. Her fingernails dug into her palms, and her internal recitations shifted to death rites for those to be executed. They were archaic, long before her time when execution had still been allowed on Krypton. They always felt oddly appropriate.

"Hmm," the man pondered as if thinking a great thought. "That can't be fun then, being shunted off to the side while she mingles."

Kara's eyes darted to Lena, talking to what Kara had vetted as the least annoying couple in the room. She was beautiful and commanding and powerful, and that made her smile.

"I came to support her," she answered quietly, a smile ghosting her lips.

Edge looked disgruntled for a second as if he honestly expected her to start complaining, but he whisked away with a sharp grin, full of pearly white teeth.

"Sure," he drawled, the smug look in his eyes returning. "You already speak like a company wife."

Kara bristled at his tone and looked away from Lena to watch him take a long sip of his scotch, finish it and place it on a passing waiter's tray. 

"What's that supposed to mean?" She snapped, regretting that he had drawn a reaction he clearly wanted from her, but the nerve was struck regardless. 

"Nothing," he shrugged, his face shifting into what he probably thought was a charming expression. "But if you're looking for a bit more excitement in your life then just waiting for her to come home, I'm always available."

Revulsion was the only way to describe the way she felt about that idea. Even if she had any interest at all in being with someone other than Lena, she would rather die then so much as kiss this man on the cheek.

"No, thank you." She managed to keep most of the disgust out of her words, but it was a poor attempt.

He didn't bother to hide his anger now.

"Come on, surely you don't like playing runner up to the last one. Now that was a match made in heaven, I grant you. Anyone with eyes could see the goo-goo looks they gave each other."

Kara could kill him for that. She could kill him for managing to hit every note of insecurity she had surrounding her relationship with Lena. That she wasn't good enough, that she was second best, that she was the back up to a far better plan. 

He could see it, she knew he could, all over her face. 

"You should be careful, though," he continued when she didn't reply. "Dating a Luthor… dangerous business."

"Lena is nothing like her family," Kara bit out, her fists clenching with rage.

He snorted.

"Yeah, well, take the warning from the last one. She still ended up dead."

Kara saw red. She saw red quite literally, in a way that could only mean the edges of her heat-vision was burning at her eyes or that she'd been doused with a particularly adept form of red kryptonite. Without warning, not caring if her actions would out her to the entire world, she spun and grabbed his collar, punching him back so fast he didn't even have time to stumble until she could slam him against a wall. Her forearm pressed against his throat, and she inched the pressure higher and higher until his toes were just skimming the floor. His eyes bulged at the lack of air, his mouth gasping for it in a horrible, choked version of breath and his fingernails scrabbled unsuccessfully at her skin, trying to pry her away.

In the back of her mind, Kara registered the shocked gasps of the crowd, but she shoved it away just as quickly in favour of glaring white-hot at this arrogant and cruel man, with his ridiculous hair and drunk breath. A flair of disgust fuelled her even more and her mouth curled into a snarl. 

"Listen up, buddy," she hissed, allowing the frantic pounding of his heart to time the beats between her words. "Samantha Arias died of cancer, painfully and tragically, and Lena was there every fucking day holding her hand and looking after their daughter, so don't you dare use her memory so foully, you got that? You arrogant piece of-"

"Kara! What the hell are you doing!?"

Kara turned her head at the horrified words to see Lena a few feet away from her, the shocked crowd behind her. Kara released some of the pressure on the man's throat, enough for him to draw in a heave of air, but not enough for him to escape. Everyone was staring at her, with looks of awe and eyes of fear, but Kara couldn't find any shame for what she had done. They were all the same, all these people, spouting their platitudes to Lena's face and whispering their poison when they thought no one that cared could hear them.

"He-"

She couldn't even get the righteous explanation out, Lena stepped by her side, her cool hand wrapping around Kara's taught and finally, for her only, Kara allowed it to drop. The man fell to the floor, his face purple and basically kicked himself away from them both as quickly as he could.

"Just go home," Lena whisper-begged. "Please." 

Kara frowned, raging inside at the situation. What did she care what any of these fake people thought about her? Why did Lena even care? No amount of money, contacts or relationships were important if those people took your hospitality and threw into your back like knives. Kara was furious on Lena's behalf. She was mad for Ruby.

She was enraged for Sam. 

Kara opened her mouth to say as much, but Lena's words caught over her own.

"We'll talk about it later. Please, go."

Kara shook her head, suddenly feeling very disappointed and very tired. If Lena wanted her to go, she would.

"Later," she all but spat, shrugging her arm away from Lena's touch. "Don't bother."

She left without a backward glance, the crowd flinching away from her like she was a predator.

* * *

Kara was in a foul mood. 

She'd woken up late, with a splitting headache that she was sure defied the laws of nature, for some hateful reason there'd been a fire downtown that she'd needed to put out, then two separate car crashes she'd jawed of life their occupants out of. All in all, she was late to work, and because she was late to work, Cat had assigned her the most ridiculous assignment in the history of assignments. 

Nia didn't seem to be too happy about it either, usually quiet as she walked beside her towards the building of the woman they were going to interview. That or she was upset about the fact that Kara had cancelled plans on her with very little notice at least three times now. Kara hesitated to broach the subject. After all this time, she still seemed to have such a problem explaining to her friends why she didn't want to see them when she felt like this. 

"I'm sorry that I'm still such a… flake." She punched in the door code they'd been given with a frown, happy that it opened on the first try.

Nia didn't answer her as they waited and got into the, rather creaky, lift. In fact, it took them going up at least two floors before she said anything at all.

"It's ok."

It wasn't, but Nia was a forgiving soul. Far too forgiving.

Kara watched as the numbers went up.

"I'm getting better," she answered quietly. "Slowly."

"Well, that's good."

"It is, yeah," Kara continued in a huff of air, tears annoyingly prickling at the back of her eyes. The last thing she needed today was to break down crying in a lift. "I'm trying to be a better person from where I was to what I became. If it wasn't for Lena, I don't know where I'd be. So, little improvements."

Nia scoffed, a sound that Kara had never heard come from her before and it was enough to pull Kara slightly back from her wallowing and glance towards the other woman, who was staring at her with a fierce for of offence.

"You know, that's great, thanks for that," Nia bristled. "Lena is the only good thing in your life."

Kara should feel stung, but all it did was make her even angrier.

"I didn't say that, did I?" She threw back. "You saw what I was like, I was an ass to everyone in the world. I hated everyone, do you know why? Cause they didn't die like Alex. Including me, I hated me, because when it happened I didn't die and I would have swapped places with her in a second."

A part of her was surprised that the words came flying out of her mouth, even more so that they had been the most honest thing she had said in a long time. Some real thing finally let out of the confusing mess that she was inside. But now Nia was looking at her with abashment, and Kara felt guilty for snapping at her when all she had done was express her legitimate frustration.

The elevator doors opened with a ding, and they both stepped out into a hallway that smelt like a strange mixture of cat and disinfectant. Kara checked the apartment numbers on the wall, turning in the correct direction and searched for the door she was looking for, Nia walking a foot behind her.

"I'm sorry."

Kara's anger extinguished, but her head still pounded. Pressing a finger to her temple, she let out a sigh.

"No, don't be," she answered softly. "I shouldn't have said that."

Stopping in front of the right door, Kara raised her hand to knock.

"Kara-"

"We've got a job to do," she cut across succinctly, her words reinforced when the door opened to reveal a rather moth-eaten older woman who called welcome and gestured them inside and towards the couch with a wide smile. Kara wrinkled her nose, narrowed down to the origin of said cat smell. 

A cat, though she was sure there were more of them, jumped on the elderly woman's lap when she sat opposite them. It's purr rumbling from its chest like a freight train when she scratched his ears.

"He's asking who you are," the woman said to them, before looking back at the cat. "They're from Catco!"

Kara blinked, exchanging a quick look with Nia before she spoke.

"So, when did you first discover you could speak to animals?"

That was what they were here for, after all. To investigate the claims that this woman was some sort of meta-human animal whisperer. It wasn't the most ridiculous power Kara had ever heard of. And given the 'claims' that Cat had cited to her when she assigned her this was one, misspelled facebook comment, Kara highly doubted its legitimacy. 

"Well, it was not long after my daughter died," the woman answered, clearly delighted at being interviewed. "First it was just her cat, him here," she looked down the happy cat, before smiling at Kara. "I just started talking to him about missing Jenny, and we bonded. Then I started hearing them all! I heard them in the city, and they needed help. All the strays." She looked back fondly at the cat. "It's nice to have someone that understands."

Kara felt her frustration with her day ebb at the woman's words, gentle sympathy replacing it instead.

"Yeah, it is," she answered quietly. "What's his name?"

The woman's smile wobbled slightly, and Kara could see the tears spring in her eyes.

"Frank," she answered. "She named him after her dad. That's my husband. He passed away a couple of years before Jenny." 

Kara shouldn't have, but she couldn't stop herself, Alex's face flashed in her mind. 

"See, then, I heard them all in the neighbourhood, and I had to help!" The woman continued, sounding enthused again. "So I started finding them and bringing them to the shelter. But I knew I needed to do more, there are so many! So I called out to Supergirl, and she answered, and she promised me she'd help find them all and bring them to safety."

Kara could feel Nia's eyes on her at that, but she didn't call the woman out on her blatant lie. Instead, she just raised the camera she had hanging around her neck with a kind smile.

"Could we take a few pictures?" She asked. 

The woman twittered excitedly, her grin stretching across her entire face, Frank the second not so much as blinking at the sudden movement. Instead, he just stared at Kara, as if daring her to insult or say something. Clearly, he didn't know her at all.

"Sure! Yeah!" The woman answered. Kara raised the camera, lined the shot ups correctly and snapped the picture. As she inspected it for quality, the old woman threw out a question to them both. "Do you need anything? Water? Juice? I have some granola bars."

Kara looked up at her from her camera, taking in her eager expression and her evident desperation to keep them there for as long as possible. A desire for human connection. 

She'd definitely written that Facebook comment herself. 

"No, thank you," she answered, rising to stand. 

The woman was clearly crestfallen, but Kara wasn't sure what more they could do short of sitting there for hours talking about all the animals this woman definitely wasn't talking to or hearing. Though, really, what did it really mean to understand what an animal was trying to tell you. And there was something pure and good in the other woman's intent to help them, born from loss—something familiar about it for sure. 

"It's sad," she said quietly once they were in the hallway near the door, Nia and her both looking back at the old woman still sitting on the couch.

"We can't print it," Nia whispered sadly. "Cat would kill us if we did, but she seems happy enough."

Kara frowned and shook her head.

"No, she's not," Kara answered. "It's a lie, but she wants to tell her story. She wants to see her husband and daughter's names in the paper. The dog thing's just an in. She lonely." 

Before Nia could answer, Kara walked back towards the old woman, she looked up once Kara was by her side.

"I'm sorry about you husband and daughter… Frank and Jenny?"

The woman blinked, surprised, but quickly tears misted her eyes. 

"Yes," she answered, her voice wobbly. "Thank you."

Kara hesitated, hovering between actions before she stretched her arms for a hug. The other woman's grateful look giving her permission to lean down and wrapped her carefully in it, trying to convey all her feelings in the gesture. The woman clung to her for a little longer then what might be polite, leaning into her warmth, before she finally let go.

"Thank you," she choked out, her breath struggling with it.

Kara gave her a final smile before turning towards a waiting Nia and exiting the apartment. Once they were in the elevator back down to the ground floor. 

"So… you're going to write it up?" Nia asked, staring at her curiously.

"Of course I am," Kara answered, hiking her messenger bag higher on her shoulder. "Why wouldn't I?"

Nia shrugged.

"Well, you said it yourself," Nia followed her as they exited the lift and then the building. "She's making it up or at the very least, massaging the truth. Reporting is supposed to be about the truth."

Kara sighed, finding her path through the press of people on the sidewalk. It was moments like this that she wished she could just fly over the crowd without having to change into her superhero getup.

"This is a human interest piece, Nia," she brushed off over her shoulder to her friend. "You can hardly expect Pulitzer prize-winning journalism. Who's to say if Supergirl really is going around saving all the dogs and cats in the neighbourhood?"

"Um, you?"

Kara didn't reply quickly, taking the pause at the red pedestrian light. Nia's eyes still burned into the side of her head. 

"Supergirl will give a quote, thumbs up of approval, dog adoptions will double, and that woman gets to see her family's memory live on in the eyes of the public," she explained succinctly and brightly, feeling happier than she had thought of it on the fly. "Good stuff all around."

It would be good. It would be good for her to do it.

"Wow," Nia answered, a grin growing on her face. "What happened to the hard-hitting reporter investigating corporate espionage?"

The light turned green, and the crowd began to walk.

"She pissed off Cat this morning during assignments," she answered. "Now come on."

* * *

Kara opened the door to Lena's apartment with an edge of trepidation. It had been radio since between them both since the night of the party, and after Kara's anger had melted and mortification replaced it, she existed in a state of nervous anxiety. Her brain convincing her more and more every day that Lena was going to end things after her atrocious behaviour. After a while, lest she dissolve into a nervous wreck, Kara decided to bite the bullet and just go to see her girlfriend. Lena had given a key with the promise to come over whenever she wanted for a reason after all.

Lena was home and busy in the kitchen when she walked in, the smell of something acrid and burning hit Kara's nostrils before Lena even looked up and noticed her. Kara hesitated, unsure if she was going to be thrown out (justifiably), but Lena's face stretched with a smile as if nothing had happened at all.

"Hey there, stranger," Lena chopped and whirled in the kitchen, turning off one boiling-over pot. "I haven't seen you all week, what's been happening?"

Kara stepped towards the counter and leaned against the marble, still feeling unsettled and watching Lena shift through the kitchen. She glanced at the three scatterer trays littering the bench, whatever Lena had tried to cook burnt to charcoal. 

"Oh, you know," she eased onto a stool. "Reporting. Supergirl stuff."

She wondered if Lena would dive into an opening, either hard or soft, to peel into the problem that had erupted between them. 

"Yeah?" Lena flitted, frowning at the gloopy sauce she was stirring, apparently not bothered at all. "Hey, do you like chicken cacciatore?"

Kara resisted the urge to sigh, then shoved it all away with every other problem in the corner of her mind.

"I like anything if it doesn't have kale," she answered flippantly.

Lena paused for the first time, turning to her with narrowed eyes. 

"That was one time," she jutted the point of the knife she was holding in Kara's direction. "And you asked for a sip of my smoothie!"

Kara laughed, easing.

"It tasted like poison."

Lena rolled her eyes, returning her attention to her cooking.

"Well, as someone who's actually been poisoned," she muttered. "I resent that."

Kara could always count on Lena to say the most utterly inappropriate thing. Her words dropped like a lead weight of worry in Kara's stomach.

"You're still making those jokes," she said, concern obvious in her voice.

Lena didn't acknowledge it.

"Well, I'll stop when they stop making me feel better," she answered, holding a spoonful of her sauce for Kara to try. "Now, taste this. What do you think?"

Kara gathered her courage and tried the sauce, unable to stop herself from gagging. 

"I think you have a drawer full of takeout menus for a reason," she answered, standing and searching for a glass to immediately drink some water.

"You can talk!" Lena said, affronted. "I've seen your attempted paella. You had to throw out that whole pan."

Kara smiled at that, all her anxiety bleeding away. Everything about her was so beautiful, and even though it might be so unhealthy, and she might be hiding things, and it all had the potential to end in tears, Kara loved her so damn much when she looked at her that she was surprised it didn't radiate off her skin.

"What?" Lena asked, her face bemused at Kara's staring.

"Nothing," she replied, shaking her head.

Lena pursed her lips before she shrugged. Looking at the mess of a kitchen, she let out a sigh and turned off the stove. Wiping her hands, she pulled out the drawer of takeout menus and rummaged inside.

"What do you think between Thai and Greek?"

* * *

Kara groaned at the report J'onn handed her, she scowled at their contents and let them land on the table before her.

"And you need to talk to the insurance adjuster again," J'onn continued his spiel. 

Kara rubbed at her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose.

"What ever happened to just saving people?" She asked grumpily, not expecting a reply. "Back in the day someone called, I just helped. Now it's all 'oh, Supergirl please help, there's a giant lizard-chicken wreaking havoc downtown, but first, we need you to fill out a form for potential damages'."

Three letters of complaint, one official sanction and a request to appear before the senate inquiry about superhero damages. Why was it that Kara had been asked twice, and her cousin, who had been operating years before she, hadn't he? Maybe sexism was alive and well for those with powers.

"Probably around the time said months damages reached into the millions," J'onn answered dryly.

Kara glared out through the doors of the conference room, contemplating melting holes in the glass.

"Oh, so it would have been better just to do nothing, is that right?" She mocked, digging her nails into the metal table, leaving screeching and deep scratches. "Let half the city fall into the ocean, all because the government isn't sure it wants to cover it? Bureaucratic nightmare… No wonder nothing gets done in this country." 

Her grumbling trailed off, and at J'onn's silence, she looked up to see him watching her with amusement.

"What?" She bit out.

"Nothing," he answered. "It's just sometimes I look at you, and I see your sister."

Rao, that just concaved her heart and all the annoyance rushed out of her like air let out of a balloon. 

"Yes, well…" Kara looked out through the glass again, this time watching all the people on the main floor rushing around. She and so many people here and she was still lonely. "I never appreciated how much paperwork she filled out because of me before. No wonder she was always grumpy."

J'onn's deep laugh rang out.

"Grumpy suited her," he replied, his eyes turning contemplative in that way of his. "I'm not sure how well it suits you. Are you sure this is just about the insurance, or are you upset for another reason?"

J'onn always had a way of seeing through her. But their relationship had been born by the common dominator of Alex, and that was why she struggled so much now under the weight of his fatherly affection. It was like missing an ingredient. 

"Why would I be upset for another reason?" She blustered, paranoid. "Did someone tell you that I was upset for another reason?"

She wouldn't put it past any of them. Kara knew that they all talked to each other, worried about her behind her back. What's the problem with Kara? How can we help Kara? What does Kara need? So much pity. It shouldn't make her as angry as it did.

"No, but I don't have to be a mind reader to read you," he replied soothingly. "What's going on?"

Kara tried to let it bleed away, some of it anyway. She wondered if this was how it was always going to be from now on. Unable to be open with anyone entirely, but allocating them all a piece of herself to digest and deal with. 

"Ruby's going on a date tonight."

"And that's… bad?"

"No," Kara replied, shaking her head. "He seems like a nice boy, and it's one of those group date things to the movies at six, so it's hardly like she's going to get into trouble. Besides, I'm Supergirl, and she has the watch anyway. But Lena… Rao."

Kara clenched her fists and rolled her neck, trying to relate some of the tension in her muscles. Arguing over how to handle a teenagers life choices had not been something she was aware would be an issue this week, or any week. Though it was just a symptom of the larger problem of course, not the cause.

"Ever since she found out she's been driving us crazy!" Kara exclaimed. "I had to talk her out of running a background check on the kid and his parents, but I'm sure she did it anyway, and she's decided to build a 'one of a kind' taser to give t Ruby before she's out the door and she's prepared a list of subtle 'psychological' questions to grill the kid with when he picks her up! And when I tried to get her to calm down, she screamed at me and said I wasn't Ruby's parent, so I didn't get a say."

That had been, aggravating to hear for all the reasons she thought it would be and a lot of reasons she didn't. 

J'onn didn't answer quickly, just blinked under the flood of her words.

"Well… wow."

Kara's frustration bubbled up again.

"That's all you've got to say? Mr' fountain of wisdom'?" She waved her hands viciously in the air as if she was living it to pieces. "I mean, what am I supposed to do with that? I know I'm not Ruby's parent, I'm not trying to be, but her saying that… it's like she thinks I'm trying to replace Sam. And if she thinks that about my relationship with Ruby, then what does she really think about my relationship with her?"

What does she think about that? What does she feel about Kara? What does she believe Kara thinks? And on and on and on.

"Maybe she feels insecure in her own relationship with her daughter," J'onn replied thoughtfully. "It's pointless to spiral down an internal investigation when she never actually said she thought that's what you were trying to do."

She thought she was losing Lena, but really she was losing herself. It was a confusing world, and she'd got messed up in it. Kara thought she could be the person she wanted to be, for Lena, for everyone. For herself. But she couldn't be.

"Alex would know what to do," she whispered. "Alex was always better at this than me. She would be better at this."

Alex was so much better than her. People saw Supergirl, and they thought she was the beacon for hope and help and all that was good in the world, and maybe she was their hero, but Alex had always been hers. She was the moral compass when Kara needed her. The person who propped her up when she fell. The one who never gave up on her even when she'd given up on herself. 

"Kara, I loved your sister, but she wouldn't have been any better at this than you."

Kara drew away from her own spiral, unsure if she had heard J'onn correctly.

"What are you talking about?"

"Alex was the bravest person I've ever known, but she got scared," he explained. "And she was hardly perfect in her relationships with people. She needed you as much as you needed her."

Grief wasn't as heavy as guilt, but it weighed more on you. 

Kara didn't want to think about that day, she didn't want to remember Alex's lifeless eyes. 

But…

"That doesn't change the fact that she'd dead, J'onn."

His chair creaked as he leaned forward, taking her hand in his own.

"You've lost so many people in your life, and so have I." J'onn's face betrayed it all for a second. The loss of a world, the loss of his daughters. "But moving forward and being happy is what they would want for us."

He handled it better then she did. But then again, he had hundreds of years of practice. 

"I know that," she answered, unsettled. "People don't have to keep telling me the same thing."

Be happy. She understood why they did it, Rao, she understood why she did it. Of course, she had no doubt that Alex would want her to be happy. She loved her. But wanting that for someone didn't make it so. It didn't banish away everything else. 

J'onn seemed to see it in her eyes, all the bullshit and all the lies she told herself. 

"When Astra died, I told you that I killed her," he suddenly said, veering off-topic. "To spare you the pain of knowing that Alex was responsible. She wanted to tell you, but I cautioned her because I didn't want you to lose each other. You needed each other. To keep going. Stronger together."

Kara had forgiven her for it, though. It was complicated and mixed up, but she had forgiven her. 

"When you were infected with Red Kryptonite, and you told Alex that she hated you, that that was the reason she had killed your aunt, that she was jealous of you, she forgave you. Because you were her sister and she loved you no matter what, even though she knew that there was some truth to what she had said." 

Kara didn't want to remember that, she never wanted to remember that. The only time she had been ultimately revealing over everything she had inside her. All the bad that she'd hidden. Every thought, word or intent. And Alex had been such an easy target.

"When she came out to you, when you came out to her, it wasn't easy either. Relief, confusion, but was there anything but love underneath? That love and that belief in each other didn't die with her. It could never die. She wouldn't be better at this then you, but she would believe in you. She knew that anything worth doing, you could do."

Kara was just so tired. 

"I can't make Lena say it."

J'onn tilted his head, his hand squeezed hers.

"Say what?"

Kara opened her mouth, she wanted to tell him. She wanted the help, the advice, her anxiety to be pierced and drained and cleaned so something better could finally grow.

She pulled her hand away instead.

"It doesn't matter. I've got to go." Kara pushed away from the desk and stood to her feet. "I'll talk to the adjuster tomorrow."

* * *

Kara eased open the door quietly, the shard of light from the hallway splitting through the black room and cut across the figure huddled underneath the blankets. She stepped in slowly, closing the door behind her and pressed the door closed behind her so that she too was encompassed by the dark. Silently, almost gliding, she felt her way to the edge of the bed, her mind engrained with memorised distance. When she sat down, the dip of the mattress stirred Lena, her voice coming out dry and cracked, with tears or sleep, Kara didn't know. 

"Kara?"

She kicked her shoes off, propped the free pillows against the headboard and scooted back until she was leaning against it. Her leg pressed up against Lena's back, turned away from her still.

"How are you feeling?" Was her answer once she was settled.

Kara listened to the gentle inhale and exhale of Lena's breath. In an out, again and again.

"I don't know." Lena's words were exhausted, stretched out, long and quiet. "Tired, mostly."

Kara sometimes forgot, between her waking up face pressed into a pillow and a hot shower, that Lena had her own damaged core. Her own pain that needed constant tending in a way that even Kara couldn't heal. It was something managed, something medical. 

Something treatable.

"How long?"

Lena sighed, and there was a soft rustling of sheets.

"A couple of days now," she answered, muttered into her pillow. "I didn't want to say anything."

That pained Kara more than anything else. 

"Sweetheart," she crooned, more then she knew Lena would want her to right now, but she couldn't stop the tone from spilling out. "You can always tell me if you're feeling depressed."

Depression. Anxiety. Post-traumatic stress. Abuse. 

What a pair they made.

"No," Lena's protest came out half-strangled with grief. "But this just means that I have to go back to the doctor to get my prescription adjusted or get a new prescription, and I just can't deal with that right now."

It had taken a long time to get her dosage right after her diagnosis, Kara couldn't forget. The irregular periods where Lena didn't seem to feel anything at all, and then when she seemed eerily calm. The day that terrified Kara the most was when Lena admitted that her suicidal thoughts had come back. 

While she had no idea what it felt like to be going through what Lena was going through, she did know one thing. That she'd do everything in her power to help Lena feel better. 

"I feel like we've had this conversation before."

Lena huffed at her words. 

"I know. I just… Before when I felt like this, I would just power through" Her tone was frustrated and self-loathing. "Now I can't even manage that."

If Kara could yank all of it out of Lena, all the horribleness of her family, everything that they had done to her. All the pain of her past, every inch that had burned had. The nature of the illnesses that she might never be free from, if she could, she would fight with every ounce of her being. She would fight it, and she would win. 

"You're not supposed to just manage it, Lena." Kara insisted. "You have a mental illness."

It was a compliment, of sorts, that Lena was comfortable with her subconsciously to be unable to power through. Or was that wrong to think, somehow toxic? Someway to placate her insane need to fix, to repair, instead of just admitting that like any illness, it would get the better of Lena if left incorrectly treated. The soldier leaning against a tree to catch their breath after being shot wasn't any less injured than the one limping on after all. In fact, the opposite was usually correct. 

"Maybe it's just my old Luthor genes then," Lena said, sounding totally defeated. "Every week, therapy, drugs, doctors, forever. That's the really depressing part."

Kara thought for a second, twirling the words around her mind.

"Ruby, me, the company, the world, happiness," she answered finally, whisper-soft. "Sounds like an ok trade, don't you think?"

A pause.

"Yeah."

Kara didn't want to be that person, the one who guilted and gripped the person they loved into getting help. But what were you supposed to do, when that same person took everything you said in the state they were in and held it up as proof of it somehow being their fault?

"Can I make an appointment for you tomorrow morning?"

There was another pause, then a long sigh.

"Yeah."

That relaxed something inside of Kara. 

"Do you want me to come with you?" She asked gently.

Lena shifted again.

"Please."

It came out begging and weak, and something swelled inside of Kara at the sound. Some rage against the cruelties of the world and a need to shelter Lena from it.

"Don't feel guilty for asking," she answered.

Lena sniffed, but still didn't cry, in that way of her's that she had that prevented tears from falling. Kara wondered if she had been an emotional child, someone expressive and loud and dancing, and if living under the thumb of her adoptive family had beaten it out of her. Something soul piece lobotomised and replaced with a fake veneer of cold unfeelingness. And Lena, prodded and poked and experimented on like a lab rat to uphold what a Luthor was supposed to be. Kara thought that little girl must still be in her somewhere, hiding in the corner and half coaxed out, still terrified that the hand saying it was safe now was going to strike her instead. Kara wondered at all that, because she knew that the girl inside of her existed too, but instead of hiding, she raged against the cage that Kara and Kara alone had put her in.

"I'm sorry about dinner."

Kara shook her head, even though Lena couldn't see it. She had known something was off in Lena's tone when she had cancelled, but it was Ruby's immediate follow-up call that brought her over anyway. Knowing Lena though, she would feel terrible that Ruby had called at all. As if somehow knowing that Lena was struggling and trying to get better was stifling her childhood. As someone who had been let down by her parents, Kara doubted that Ruby felt that way.

"Don't worry," she replied. "We fended ok, and considering Ruby's the only decent cook in this apartment, maybe she should start making us dinner."

Lena laughed weakly, finally releasing the cap, and the laugh finally seemed to give her permission to cry. She curled into herself as she did, apparently still ashamed and refusing to look at Kara. 

"Tell me something real."

Sitting beside her in the dark, Kara's fingers hovered unsurely, should she touch Lena or not? She looked so small, layered under sheets. It reminded Kara in an aching way of the person she'd seen first under the protective armour that Lena had worn when they met.

Now she was vulnerable and soft, even though she was in pain, she was honest. Something that Kara wasn't, not really, not at all. But Lena wanted her to tell her something real.

_Something real._

"When I was a child, I idolised my parents."

Kara wished there was another way to comfort Lena. But something told her that in this state, raw honesty was the only thing that she would accept. Something about the depression layered lies over how Lena viewed herself but seemed to strip bare to the truth of everyone else. She found Lena's hand in the dark on instinct. She revelled in that feeling, remembering what it had been like when she'd first touched her, unbidden and without knowing what she was doing and only realising later what the warmth that spread from their skin to her heart meant.

Kara fooled herself into now knowing why she was lying to Lena about everything she was feeling. She lied because she liked it. Because admitting the truth meant piercing the happiness she'd regained and was so terrified of losing for the third time. Just for a bit, in that place, she could pretend. She could imagine that they were all still alive, underneath the burnt red sky. But she wasn't just a Kryptonian. She was the last of them. They were all gone now, only Clark and her left. Clark, who hadn't seen her since the funeral. Clark that didn't, couldn't, wouldn't, bear all that their heritage meant. 

And Alex…

Kara really loved Lena. She loved her the way she loved the coloured leaves of Krypton. She loved the gentle way she was with things, not just Ruby and Kara, whenever they weren't looking. Kara loved the way she tended to the tiny wall garden she had on her balcony. She loved the way she counted the seasons, measured her life by the weather of the day. She loved the way she curled in an armchair, surrounded by books she'd memorised but still wanted to read one more time. She loved the days when they were both free, no work and no emergencies—the days when the three of them did things together, like a real family.

Kara loved her.

Maybe that was enough to unlock her.

"I idolised Krypton." She still doesn't know why she's telling her this. But Lena's breathing had evened in that way that Kara knew she was listening. But her nerves were running jagged and wild. She just wanted it to be easy. She didn't want to be the next person in a long line that let their crazy, their pain, supplant hers—that demanded sympathy for themselves in place of actually caring. Right now, this was supposed to be about her. Helping her.

But she wanted something real. And this was as much as Kara could give her. 

"Having that dream, that memory pristine." She squeezed Lena's hand as she said it, grateful now for the enveloping dark so that Lena couldn't see her face. "I thought grounded me my whole life. It gave me something to hold on to. But I was wrong. 

The burning. The fire. So much death that surrounded her wherever she went.

"It kept me caged from reality," Kara's spare hand clenched into a fist against the sheets, balancing between ripping them and holding them strained just above tearing. "My childhood on Krypton was pristine because I needed it to be. But there comes a time when we all must let go of childhood things." 

A sculpted bird. Holograms of stars. Family.

_Alex…_

"My mother locked up criminals, sentenced them to a fate worse than death." She scrubbed away at herself, exposing the words like barbed wire. "To be suspended in the phantom zone forever…" 

She remembered it. She didn't want to. Lost in the dark and silence. Lost in the universe.

"And my father created the Medusa Virus." That viciousness, that cruelty. The creation of it, something born from the mind of war criminals. "They weren't the only ones. Krypton was rotten from the foundations. Xenophobia, the caste system, anti-science promotion. The world was dying, and they refused to believe it. I idolised my parents, my people, I modelled my life after what I believed they would want me to be."

Kara raised her free hand away from the sheets to her mouth. All to stop herself from pulling in a ragged breath. Some sound must have escaped though, because, after a few seconds, Lena turned. Rotating her body sideways and lifting her head until she rested in on Kara's lap. The action realised their joined hands and Kara found herself resting it on Lena's hair automatically. 

"People are always more than one thing," Lena whispered against Kara's leg.

"Maybe," Kara sighed, steadily stroking Lena's hair. "But they were hypocrites. What does that make me?"

Lena didn't answer quickly, in fact, it took her so long to answer Kara actually wondered if she would. 

"You patterned your life after things you admired about them," she finally said. "You don't need to answer for sins you didn't even know about."

The right idea in the right place at the right time could change the course of life. But sometimes Kara did something or did something, and Lena looked at her, and Kara thought that she wasn't seeing her at all, she was just remembering. 

"You're good at this," Kara whispered back. "I'm in a transitional place right now. I'm still searching for who I am. I'll always be the only one left. The last witness."

There was a reason Kara didn't talk about this. It delved too far into the realm of self-pity, and she'd used all her's up for a lifetime. She had so much now, she didn't need to be wasting time thinking about everything she'd lost. 

Of course, she wasn't supposed to think that. Years of therapy told her she definitely wasn't supposed to think like that.

"You're so much more."

It was so quiet, a half breath exhaled near sleep. 

She'd been broken apart so many times, Kara struggled to remember a time when she wasn't scratching blindly around her for pieces that had fallen loose. Wherever she went, searching for fragments she might have accidentally have left behind. Broken people help broken people, but Kara hardly ever succeeded. Not really.

Kara bent to kiss Lena's forehead, stroking her hair still as she fell asleep. Kara let Lena curl around her, cling to her like a lifeline and felt guilty for suddenly being more grounded feeling needed when Lena was like this then when she was happy. Because like this, she didn't feel like one day Lena would reject her when she finally realised that Kara was still far too broken to be good for her. She couldn't process her own feelings anymore, not the way she used to. Something about being around Lena fried her brain and blistered her thoughts. All jumbled up together and lost and unable to be free.

When they'd first started this Kara thought she was on the path to recovery, that somehow things would get better, step by step. But in this rush, of so much love and so much insecurity, Kara didn't know what to do. One day, maybe she'd find what she was was looking for, but today wasn't it. All her life, Kara had been able to find words, what stole them now could only be herself.

Kara fought against tears but was unable to stop them. The least she could manage was that they fell quietly, not disturbing Lena's sleep, her head in Kara's lap with soft steadying breaths. She couldn't stop her mind from racing, jumping back and forth between every moment of happiness in her life, and the moments they were all snatched away. The panic attacks she used to have, had reoccured having when Alex died, bordered on the edge of it all and she tried to breathe her way through it, listing the names of people she'd helped as Supergirl in her mind the way she'd been taught. A technique to ground her, without relying on crutches. 

She was weak though, and she didn't really want to stop herself when she turned on her phone, lowered the volume so it wouldn't disturb Lena, and opened that album of videos. 

The video she picked was shaky, unable to keep the camera still, Kara heard the echo of her past self's giggles as she waited, it trained on the front door of the apartment. Not a few seconds in, the familiar click of the door lock shifted, and Kara's giggles intensified, though she tried to stifle them. 

Finally, the door opened with an unsuspecting swing, Alex stepping through with a bag of groceries and immediately getting doused with the bucket of water Kara had painstakingly rigged up. 

Kara's laughter had burst out of her, crackling through the phone speakers, at the sight of Alex's dripping and shocked face. Eyeing her with stunned and sudden annoyance. 

"Right," her sister had shaken out her hair, gently placing the soggy bag of groceries on the kitchen island. "I'm not even in the door, and I'm fucking soaked."

She made no effort to remove her jacket, just let the water seep further as she sat down on the couch and eyed Kara with exasperated exhaustion. 

Kara had just cackled, the phone shaking violently and unfocused. Alex watched her silently, shaking her head, before looking to the bucket on the floor, leftover water pooling on the boards. Kara had known that Alex would make her clean it up unless she wanted to pay for pizza night for at least three weeks. 

"How long have you had that there?" 

"About forty minutes," Kara was still snickering, sitting on the armchair opposite Alex. "I was just waiting like a dog for you to come home."

Her sister had sighed.

"You shit," she muttered, pinching her wet shirt away from her body for a second. "I can't believe that I'm soaked."

Kara took a breath, trying to steady her voice.

"Tough day at work?"

"No," Alex rolled her eyes, and Kara started to laugh again. "Really easy day at work. Tough time the second I get into my own home."

Kara laughed freely again, in burst out of her like a dam and in a swift movement, Alex sprung from the couch and tried to snatch the phone from her hand. The video stifled and shook, the sounds of running ensued for a few seconds, and when it finally settled again, raised on Alex who was now smiling across from the dining room table, having chased Kara around it three times.

"Look at how happy you are!" Alex laughed now too, pointing at Kara's face, unable not to join in her childlike glee, her annoyance swept away once and for all.

Kara turned off the video.

* * *

She was no stranger to grief. She'd lost her family, her people, her entire world and it had split her in half, changed her brain, cut through the fibre of everything she was. The recovery of that, rebuilding the world she'd lost inside of herself had taken so long, single threads woven together into a new tapestry of life. Something that had to be big enough to eclipse all that she'd lost, so that somehow, in the quiet part of herself that she never shared, she could feel relief for balancing it out enough that it had some purpose. Everything in her life had to have some meaning. 

Losing Alex burned all of that, everything, to ash once more. Ground together until the ash became dust, and the dust turned to atoms, and the atoms turned to nothing. An entire reality erased, everything that could have been should have been, hacked off—a missing limb of future. 

But that was the fantastic thing about life, you could just start again. Just wipe it away like a whiteboard and start again. What was the use of being intelligent or good looking if you weren't kind? People said that all you need in life is someone to love, something to do and something to wish for. But if her entire life was about loving someone, wanting to be with them and hoping for them to love you back, was that healthy at all? To go from grief to that… well, it was just replacing one crutch with another.

Maybe she just needed to start again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know how you're feeling, what you liked and what you didn't in the comments below. Or come and scream into the void with me on Tumblr @assumingminds19


	2. regret

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I've lost it all, I'm just a silhouette  
> I'm a lifeless face that you'll soon forget  
> And my eyes are damp from the words you left  
> Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest  
> Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest
> 
> T/W MENTIONS OF SUICIDE THIS CHAPTER

Kara had yet to get used to again how incredibly stressful fun-filled, family activities were. 

"Come on! We've got to go!" Ruby's voice bellowed down the hall as Kara helped Lena tick off the items on her list in the kitchen. Yes, a literal list.

It was the first perfect day of summer vacation, and Kara had thought it would be a fun idea to drive out of the city for the day and go to the beach. Little had she known.

"Did you pack the sunscreen?" Lena asked Ruby in _that_ tone, rechecking the Tupperware lids.

"Ugh," Ruby groaned in reply, flip-flopping towards them and away from the door, irritation colouring her voice. "No."

"Then we're not going anywhere until you do," Lena said simply. Ruby shot Kara an exasperated look when Lena wasn't looking. Still, Kara shook her head minutely, just hoping the would be able to get out the door sometime this century before Lena remembered something else they might just need. It had already been two hours of this, and while Kara adored Lena for her need to prepare for all apocalyptic scenarios, she was itching to get into the water. Ruby rolled her eyes with another huff, moodily but silently stomping off to the bathroom to look for the sunscreen.

"Kara?" She raised her head at the sound of her name. "Can you get some towels?" Lena asked distractedly, fishing through her handbag for something. "Not the good ones, the beach towels."

"Ok," Kara said, wary of asking a question after getting her head bit off last time, but kind of needing to. "Where are the beach towels?"

Lena tsked. Kara wondered if was an annoyed sound meant for her.

"The first dresser on the right, in the- "

A loud crash and a bang from the bathroom and Lena's head whipped around at it.

"Ruby!"

"Sorry!"

Lena let out a groan, then rushed off in that direction, quickly the sound of more bickering reached Kara's ears. Kara took a deep breath and went in search of the beach towels. Lena had said the dresser, so she probably meant the dresser in the main bedroom. At least Kara hoped she did because even her x-ray vision wasn't good enough to quickly discern through different piles of linen, sheets and clothes at a rate that wouldn't get her snapped at for not hurrying up. 

The master bedroom's walk-in closet was huge and entirely dominated by Lena's clothes, shoes, jewellery, hats, and handbags. There was so much of it that whenever Kara stepped into the space, she tended to feel a little lost. Lena kept this space in a complete sense of functional disorganisation for someone so obsessed with order in every other aspect of her life. She most definitely had a system, but Kara didn't have a clue what it was, and she looked warily between the three different sections of drawers, supposing that they might all qualify as dressers. 

Opening the first drawers closest to her, Kara's ears burned when she saw what Lena had stored in there and snapped it closed just as quickly. While she wasn't opposed to… things. She and Lena used…. things…. quite often and to great effect, Kara was decidedly prudish when she was thinking about…. things…. out of Lena's presence. Sexual confidence, it seemed, didn't follow her through all aspects of daily living. 

Turning to the next set of shelves next, Kara searched through them carefully, relieved to find them full with far more innocuous things. She smiled in triumph when opening the bottom drawer revealed a bundle of bright beach towels. When she reached to pull them out, shaking them loose and unfolded at her speed, a folded slip of paper fell out from between them and onto the floor. Kara frowned, bundling the towels to her chest with one hand and reached for the paper with her other, plucking it from the floor with two fingers, Kara recognised Lena's handwriting on the paper and without thought, read it, her heart sinking as she did.

_Sam,_

_I finally made a decision. As long as I can remember, whenever things got rough, my instinct was to head home because that's where I felt safe. But I realise that the idea of a home doesn't exist for me anymore, because you were my home. Whenever there was a storm, you were my shelter. Without you, I feel lost. No matter how hard I try, I can't believe you're not coming back. And everyone keeps saying that you would want me to move forward and I know that that's true. But I will never stop loving you._

_Lena_

Kara didn't know what to feel when she finished, but she had to stop herself from crumpling the paper in reflex. Not out of anger, just… shock. Dismay, maybe. Regret. Kara was always aware that there was a missing presence here that she wasn't filling. It wasn't like she… 

Kara looked back at the paper, guiltily now knowing for sure that this hadn't been meant for her eyes. It was an invasion of Lena's privacy, but it wasn't like she had known that when she'd started to read it. And why had Lena hidden it in a random towel drawer anyway? Did she place it there deliberately, somewhere safe that she'd only know where to find? But surely if that were the case, she wouldn't have sent Kara looking for the towels. But if it was there accidentally, how exactly did it get there? Should Kara put it back in the drawers where the towels had been either way? But then Lena would know or might guess that she'd… Should she leave in on the dresser instead? Or give it to Lena and explain how she'd found it, that she'd read it, that…

_I will never stop loving you._

Kara swallowed, eyes drawn back to the smooth cursive lines.

_Loving you._

What was this? A written expression of pain? Something in the dark? Something for the funeral? When had she written it? 

"Kara!" The shout shocked Kara out of her spiralling thoughts. "Are you coming?"

Kara hesitated, torn, before making a decision she knew she would regret later and shoved the letter in her pocket.

"Yeah," she cleared her throat, answered, walking out of the bedroom. "Found the towels."

* * *

PLAY

_The frame wobbled as it focused in on their faces, a strange upward angle on their faces as they waited. Kara tried to zoom in correctly, her tongue poking out her lips a little in concentration, while Alex was using a mirror to peer around the corner and get eyes of J'onn's office._

_A few seconds passed before Alex gave Kara the thumbs up, and Kara let out a nervous breath before refocusing on the camera._

_"Ok, so the plan-"_

_"Do you have to record everything?" Alex exasperated, half-hissing as she tried to snatch the phone from Kara's hands._

_The image jerked and stabilised in the scuffle, Kara easily holding Alex back._

_"Hey, we might need this," Kara retorted, a little affronted at her cool heist video being knocked. It wasn't every day they'd have to chance to pull a prank on J'onn without his knowledge; the moment needed to be honoured._

_"Why, to incriminate ourselves?" Alex huffed, rolling her eyes and making one more half-hearted grab for the phone._

_"No," Kara sniffed primly, shoving Alex slightly for her trouble, sending her sister lurching a half-step to the right. "It's for posterity. Looking back on the good times."_

_Alex had just briefly lost her balance, but it earned Kara a menacing glower. It succeeded though, at least, in shutting her up, at least about the camera._

_"Fine."_

_A wide smile, happy to have gotten her way, filled Kara's face._

_"Right!" She whispered enthusiastically, overmuch and leaving Alex rolling her eyes again. "Here's the plan. Agent Eagle-"_

_"Who the fuck is Agent Eagle?"_

_Kara pouted at the sharp interruption._

_"Alex, weren't you even listening when we talked about codenames?" She whined, dejected at the thought. Though, if she were honest, a part of her knew Alex wasn't really listening during her brainstorming session last night, far too focused on WWE Divas._

_"There's only two of us," Alex clarified dryly. "We don't need codenames."_

_Rao, Alex had a way of sucking the fun out of things that were by definition, practically ineligible for any fun-sucking._

_"What if someone's listening in on us?" Kara pointed out, looking around warily. The last thing they needed was for their names to come up first on the suspects' list. Is was all well and good for Alex to resist J'onn's interrogations, but Kara cracked under pressure far too quickly._

_"You've already called me by my name since you started this video."_

_Kara's frown deepened, and Alex let out a long-suffering sigh._

_"Fine," Alex conceded, sounding equally bored and glum now. "Whatever."_

_Kara shook off her sister's lack of enthusiasm, trying to bounce the conversation back towards an optimistic note._

_"You're Agent Eagle, and I'm Captain Sun."_

_"Hang on," Alex cut in again, annoying Kara more. "Why are you a captain? What if I want to be a captain?"_

_Kara supposed that she should be happy that Alex was getting a little more invested, but she was a little confused by her sudden insistence._

_"Because… you're an agent?"_

_She said it like it was a question like maybe Alex wasn't one anymore or something, and she'd forgotten._

_"In real life, yeah," Alex answered without humour, crossing her arms and levelling a hard look at Kara. "But maybe for the codenames, I want to be a captain."_

_Kara had no idea what weird thing or thought or imagined slight was currently going on in Alex's head, and maybe on another day she'd want to investigate further, but their window of opportunity was closing. So even though she had spent an extensive amount of time brainstorming why their respective codenames perfectly balanced reflection of their inner selves, outer selves and were short in length, she allowed Alex her small victory._

_"Ok… you can be Captain Sun-"_

_"What happened to eagle? I preferred eagle."_

_Kara threw up her hands, the screen focus facing the ceiling, a flash of Alex's ear and then finally, that same weird angle of their chins. She had already run these codenames past Alex last night, and she had grunted her assent. Sure, Kara may have taken advantage of the fact that Alex's eyes were glued to wrestling women's biceps and thighs, but that didn't mean that Kara hadn't known what she was doing._

_"Fine!" She snapped, red-faced and out of patience with Alex's ridiculous pettiness. "You can be Captain Eagle, and I'll be Captain Sun."_

_"There can't be two captains," Alex shook her head. "That's just silly."_

_A vein in Kara's forehead twitched, and honestly, it took all of her not just to freeze breath Alex in a corner to think about her dumb behaviour._

_"Yes, there can!" She grumped back, bitter now._

_Alex's scowl matched her's with equal ferocity._

_"What's your problem with being an agent, then?" She sneered. "Not good enough for you?"_

_Alex said it with that same irritated tone she'd used whenever teenage Kara accidentally said something offensive on inappropriate, and the out of place patronising blew the lid off Kara's temper well into the stratosphere._

_"Ok!" She bellowed back. "I'll be Agent Sun! Because it's sooo important apparently-"_

_"Don't have to talk to me like-"_

_"What are you two doing?"_

_The camera slipped and fell onto the ground, the angle only able to make up half of J'onn's left boot._

_"Nothing," Kara's voice came through muffled but squeaked with practised innocence. "Noth-"_

STOP

PLAY AGAIN

* * *

Kara had to remember to pick up eggs on her way home tonight. But it'd have to be after she finally managed to collect the dry cleaning, which she'd forgotten three days in a row now and Lena had been looking for that jacket this morning. Maybe she should swing by the park too, see if the food festival was worth checking out. Might be a good idea to take Ruby on the week-

"How have you been doing?"

Kara blinked, looking away from the window she'd been staring out of, lost in thought.

"What?" Kara flushed, her ears processing what she'd been asked after she spoke. "Sorry," she rushed, awkwardly shuffling in her seat and dutifully returning her attention to the man sitting in the chair opposite. "I was a bit distracted."

He nodded in that way that she hated. That nod that all psychologists, therapists, counsellors seemed to have. The 'I know, I understand' nod without saying it out loud. Like everyone they treated didn't realise that's what it meant. 

"You seem to be distracted a lot lately."

Kara thought a mean thought about the man, involving his aerodynamic capabilities, but dismissed it just as fast. Focusing instead on unclenching the hand she hadn't realised she'd clenched and unwiring the jaw she hadn't realised she'd wired.

Years of this, and honestly Kara was starting to believe they were just going in circles. First, it had been the mandatory trauma and grief counselling with the DEO's in house psych. She hadn't remembered the first two months of that, too busy trying to handle the funeral and keep Eliza-

Yeah. She didn't go there.

Of course, she must not have handled it all that well, the spinning plates well and truly crashed together, because she was barred from returning to active duty and was fired from her job in the same week. Of course, holing herself up and away from the world wasn't an option when the only light at the end of the tunnel was the thought of going back out as Supergirl and doing something worthwhile. The only way she'd be able to do that without J'onn killing her was to get the all-clear and finish her mandatory sessions. Ten of them. She'd finished them. J'onn held the bag as 'Supergirl', and Kara realised that no one really needed her at all, which was supposed to be freeing but just made her more depressed and angry. 

But still, she'd like the feeling of a checkpoint in her week. Somewhere she could just stop and unload and look forward to unloading, to sharing. So that the rest of the week's bullshit didn't overwhelm her so much, because she had that voice in her head saying 'deal with this in your session'. It wasn't Alex, but it was something.

So she'd gotten a referral to another psych, a lingering paranoia in her mind that J'onn might have access to her records as her boss prompting her to. That woman had been an expert in treating aliens, particularly alien refugees. She was highly regarded, well recommended, very friendly, had a great sense of humour and Kara had lasted two weeks. The second the words' survivors guilt' and 'deep issues' got tossed around a spiky wall had erected around her heart and head, and she hadn't wanted anything to do with anyone for a solid fortnight before someone had slipped a group therapy pamphlet under her door. To this day, she still didn't know how it was, but she had a lingering suspicion in was her agoraphobic neighbour two floors down. The one she always left any flowers she found pretty when she was flying around the world.

Kara had given in a go, what had she got to lose, she figured. It was so much more her speed. It was nice to not be the singular focus, for one. To just be able to sit and listen and absorb and get some perspective. Everyone was hurting. Everyone had lost someone. It didn't make it easier, and you'd think Kara of all people wouldn't need to be reminded, but it was good. To be reminded.

It had just been that for a long while, Kara slipping in and through and out again of the shredded curtains of her life. She didn't do much, didn't see many people. Got a new job and a stupid, small paper where she didn't have to think too hard, and spent her week on the same endless cycle. Group, work, sleep, eat, Alex. 

It was only when she found herself accidentally in the middle of her own intervention, that Kara began to consider that maybe her friends had a point, and that maybe Alex dying hadn't taken all the good bits of life with her.

Maybe.

Kara made more of an effort after that. This psych was better too, though she started their sessions tentative, at least he didn't try to help her too much. Kara realised that might be a bit of an oxymoron, but she didn't want too much interference. Better a sounding board to help her figure out how to readjust her course and maybe the occasional nudge in whatever direction that was. 

It had been a functional relationship for a while, but lately, Kara had felt restless. Not sure if she needed this. Or if it was getting her anywhere at all. 

"I think… I think I should stop coming here." It came out of her quickly, but not that fast considering all her introspection. "I don't know if… I don't know if I should stop, I don't. I'm just trying to do what's best for me, and I don't know if this is it." 

She didn't know if any of it was it, but she didn't want this anymore. It was starting to feel like a chain around her ankle now. Dragging behind her when she had other things to do, had a better person to be already for Lena and Ruby and everyone in this city, she helped as Supergirl.

"I've tried and tried, and it's gotten me far," she rushed out to explain, uncomfortable that she felt she had to justify this out loud. "But I've hit a wall that I can't surmount. I need to try something new. And maybe it won't work, and maybe I'll come back realising what a horrible mistake I've made, but today I just need to breathe. Dreading this every week can't be the answer anymore."

Kara was already halfway to the door before the man even had the chance to stand. 

"I really think-"

"If it's all the same with you," Kara cut in. "I don't want to talk about why it's not a good idea. So… thank you, for everything and um… I'm going to be going now."

Another one bit the dust.

* * *

PLAY

_The camera angle was shaky, facing Kara's back as she painted quietly. Slowly, as if not to disturb her, Alex walked up to her staying quiet the whole way. Once she was positioned over her shoulder, there was a few second of peace following Kara's delicate strokes before Alex raised the foghorn she was holding and pressed it down._

_The resounding short, but blaring sound, almost had Kara jumping through the roof. As it was, her paintbrush skidded across her canvas, leaving a long, dark, out of place streak. The camera shook out of focus as Alex doubled over laughing at the hilarity of it, Kara's muffled protests sounding through the background._

_"You're such a brat! Look what you did to my painting!"_

_Alex straightened the camera, still chuckling, focusing it on Kara's indignant and flushed face._

_"You should be thanking me!" Alex called back. "It looks much better now."_

_Kara huffed, blowing a loose strand of hair out of her face, before turning back to the canvas with hunched shoulders, muttering under her breath._

_"Does this mean I get credited?" Alex asked cheekily._

_Kara rounded on her again, incensed._

_"Yeah, that bit!" She pointed to the streak. "You get credit for that bit!"_

_Alex laughed louder._

STOP

PLAY AGAIN

* * *

Her lip throbbed with the cut, but Kara found herself liking the feeling. The maybe weird, but constant urge to touch it with the tip of her tongue to feel the sting agitating at the front of her brain. 

This was the first time in a long since she had last blown out her powers. A rash display, that's what Alex would have thought. Snapping at her with harsh low words and angry looks, cautioning her again and again and making sure she spent her time powerless hidden behind thick walls and perched under the yellow sun lamps. Ever paranoid that Kara would attract death if she so much as stepped foot outside without being bulletproof. Kara used to find it annoying, and endearing and overly-protective and so, so, Alex.

Kara spent a lot of time wondering what dying felt like, what death sounded like. She'd held them in her arms as they gasped for their last breaths, she'd pulled the rubble off their crushed bodies. It never discriminated, it didn't choose between the drunk driver wrapped around a tree or the little girl who'd fallen into a pool in the split second her mother looked away. Living with that type of death would change most people, but all Kara could do during all of it was hold it in her heart with all the others she couldn't save. Wondering what it must be like for it all to be over, even not for the people left behind wondering why. Kara wondered if her own would burst like those notes, let out her last cries of pain, and then go silent forever. Or maybe she'd turn into a shadowy static that was barely there, only if people just listened hard enough. No fight was as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones she fought when her mind splintered and raced, threatening to swallow her into her own, again.

Kara was numbed out by the cold, the wind tunnels of the passing cars on the bridge she found herself walking on in the dark. The last remaining sensible brain cell in her head screamed at her to go home, or at least go somewhere warm before she caught a cold. She'd already turned her phone off after Lena's first text, knowing that she would, of course, have been informed that Kara had solar-flared and led the DEO against advice. It was slowly making Kara feel sick with how much Lena cared and how much Kara could not reach back to the hand she was offering her. To the open arms. It should have been different after Midvale. Spilling all of it out should have blown the release valve off the top of the pressure cooker of feeling. But it had only been a temporary relief, the cooker had just grown smaller, and she still looked at Lena, and she still couldn't just tell her. How much she loved her, how much it burned through all her cells and how much it fought against the weight of everything else. 

And so, she couldn't stop walking, trying to do something physically human, so when she was lying awake that night, staring up at the shadowy ceiling, she could feel herself getting better. Ears shut off from the rest of the world for once so she could hear something inside herself. Understand something. Something on her mattress, surrounded by bare walls and empty, dust circled spaces were frames once were. Something other than nostalgic fear, regret and so much wrongness in her mouth, the taste swallowed up everything else.

She was so lost in it all she almost didn't see them, her eyes almost skipping over before finally skipping back and trying to make sense of the strange shape on the viewing platform she was walking past. But she stopped when she realised, something shocking through her like lightning and she half-stumbled, half-ran towards them, the sound of her feet causing the person's head to snap around towards her and almost slip.

That stopped her.

"Don't," Kara called her heart in her throat. Knowing that no matter what, right now, she would never be fast enough. "Please." 

The man's fingers, white-knuckled, clenched around the thick steel cable. His balance weak and wobbly on the bridge's railing. He looked back at her with hollow eyes, dancing with some feral, cornered panic. Caught between the fall and Kara. 

Kara swallowed, rooted to her spot, terrified that if she moved, blinked, did anything at all, it would be the last moment of this stranger's life.

No super-speed. No strength. No power to save him. 

"Please come down." Her fingers ached to reach out for him. "Nothing's this important."

She tried to convey it with her eyes, pleading in her voice. Something.

He wobbled again on the rail, and Kara's heart pounded in her throat. 

"What do you care?" His voice cracked and broken. Kara didn't need super-sight to see all the despair behind his red-rimmed eyes. Lost, forgotten, beaten by the world with no way out anymore. 

She hesitated a moment, her mouth open, searching for the right thing to say. 

"Because I… I owe someone." Something in Kara's chest clenched around that. It wasn't a line or a plea. Not an attempt to get him down, just the truth. 

She owed everything. She owed it all.

A strangled laugh seemed to wrench itself out of the man's lungs.

"Not me," he cried with it, turning back to look down at the water what felt like a thousand metres below. 

She'd caught people that had jumped from this bridge before. She'd talked them down from ledges of buildings, heard their cries in the night and snatched the guns before they could pull the triggers on themselves. Alex's face and voice and memory and her life had been pressing and swelling and filling every corner of her mind for so long, and Kara couldn't seem to stop the memory she'd tried so hard to push away replaying itself in her mind now. That final day, the last, stupid, argument. The final minutes. The instant it was all over. Calling out her name and trying to shake some life back into her eyes. But there was no final goodbye, no peace or closure. Supergirl couldn't save her life. Supergirl couldn't save this man. 

Only Kara. Maybe. 

Please, Rao, maybe.

"Why not you?" How could she be so weary? How, with the flood of adrenaline in her veins could she be sadder than ever, more hopeless than ever, feeling every inch of herself up on that railing with him. One man, in a city of millions. And everything about him mattered so much.

"You know, a minute ago, all I could think about was how I'm disappointing the people in my life," Kara continued, honesty and clarity finally spilling out. "And then I saw you, and I changed my thinking."

The man's shoulders shook, from the wind or tears Kara couldn't know.

"Go away…" He answered desperately. "I'm not worth it."

It wasn't true. Kara wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but she knew that he wouldn't believe her. Because that was a thing she knew and she wouldn't believe herself either. So instead, she just asked.

"Why aren't you worth it?"

Rao, why wasn't she? Why were any of them given this gift of life when it could be taken so quickly and viciously away?

"You wouldn't understand," he scratched, looking back over his shoulder at her.

Kara risked it, she took a step forward and let him watch her do it.

"Look at me." She gestured over herself with a half-scoff, half-broken laugh. For what felt like her entire life, Kara had been trying to keep it together. Put on a brave face and project to the world an aura of confidence and happiness and contentment, so nobody would ever suspect had fundamentally broken and unrepairable she was on the inside. She never wanted anyone to see all that she was. Never wanted them to. Not until now. Kara needed him to see her battered and bruised and hunched in on herself.

"Please," she begged out. "I understand." 

A soft silence grew between them, Kara wondering if both their breaths were caught in their throats. Then she saw his shoulders relax, ever so slightly, imperceptibly. 

"What's your name?" She asked softly.

He hesitated over it, before answering just as quietly.

"Sean."

"Mine's Kara," she licked her lips, wincing now at the sting of the cut. "Don't do it, Sean."

"Why do you care?"

It was an accusation, hoarse and raw, and Kara wondered if they could hear it too. All of them. 

Alex. 

Lifeless eyes. 

"Because it'll be ok again," Kara told him because it was the truth. She had to believe it was the truth because she'd felt that. It may not be better right now, not all the time, but it was ok again. She had so much more then she ever thought she could have and even if she wasn't ready, or she was too ready, or felt too much or too little she had it—Lena and Ruby and a life and people that cared for and loved her and wanted her. 

Wanted _her_.

"No, it's not," Sean shook his head viciously. "It'll never be ok again." Kara's eyes prickled with tears at the despair in his voice. "I loved her so much… I just wanted her forever, but she told me she couldn't do it anymore." His dark eyes were red and weak now, his hand still clenched around the steel cord and his body still swayed on the rail. "She told me she couldn't be the only thing I hung on for that it was too much pressure. And she was right because I don't have anything else. I dropped out of high school; I haven't got a job. I've got no money. I'm sleeping in my shitty car, and I'm an inch away from losing that."

It was a rote list, a note from the rock-bottom he'd hit again and again until he couldn't find a way up. 

"What's the point anymore?" He finished. "It's never going to get better."

She could say so many things, try to say, but the only thing that came to mind was the same old truth.

"It can, Sean," Kara stepped forward again, muscles rigid with tension and her heart still pounding. His eyes widened at her advance, warningly, and it made her stop for a second before she tried again in a gentler tone. "I promise. You can have so much time still. So much you can do."

It was jerky, clumsy words. Platitudes. It felt like a bandaid on top of an amputation, even being the one saying them.

"I was born in National City, I'll die in National City," Sean spat back, with enough venomous self-loathing in his voice to make Kara shudder with familiarity. "I've done fuck all." 

With his free hand, he grabbed his other arm, pulling at it. Looking like half of him was fighting to die against the part that might still wish to live.

"Why can't you just let me, huh?" Tears spilled out of his eyes, pouring down and down into the dark, maybe hitting the water before he would. "I don't matter."

Kara could smell rain in the air too now. Not earthy, the way it might have been outside the city. But metallic and must-filled. But something else also, a breeze coming in off the coast. Salt in the air and some hint of dawn, coming now as the lights of the city turned off in anticipation for it. Some strange witching hour that wasn't quiet at all, but still filled with rough, vibrating anticipation. 

Her world was filled now with excuses. Excuses for herself, excuses for others. Seeking an absolution that would never come. Sean's fingers twitched against the metal. His others pulled almost purple at his sleeve. The cords in his neck were so tight, and Kara just felt so pushed beyond the realm of tired that she'd circled back around or crashed through the floor or broken the ceiling on the only thing she knew she had in her to be.

Kara closed her eyes for a beat, took a deep breath.

"You know, I've met a lot of people in my life," she answered him. "Everyone of them mattered."

Kara opened her eyes and looked at him, really looked at him and tried to see every part of him that was screaming out and all the parts that weren't. He just stared back, but his mouth hung open slightly, and Kara prayed to Rao that something inside him still believed it. Could trust it coming from a stranger's mouth who had no reason to lie.

"She left me." It was a weak and shrugged out answer, but it was still an answer. "I don't want to live without her."

"Why not?" Kara made a weird sound in the back of her throat, a choking laugh, half a cough. "You lived before her, didn't you?"

His dark eyes darted to meet hers, challenging, rebuking, but not arguing. As if trying to be cynical and failing in the act. Kara didn't want to be distracted at the moment, but she felt hands on her shoulders then. Lena's, and Alex's too. Memories of another time, under winter trees in cemeteries, when suicide spilled from mouths, and times of twenties spent in meaningless despair, cigarettes hanging burnt out from lips, and self-destruction that always lay at the bottom of a bottle. Kara had never been there, not in that way, but she still felt like the boatman. Ferrying people across that same river, surrounded by it all and trying to keep it all together for everyone else. She may not want to die, but she knew exactly what it meant to try and find a way to live truly.

"But that wasn't living," he replied finally, looking up at the sky. "Not without her."

Kara couldn't see anything up there. Not without her super-sight, not through the fog of night pollution. There were no stars in the dark, but she knew they were there. An entire universe was circling them, just out of reach.

"Does that mean it wasn't real?" Kara whispered, barely audible. "That it didn't matter? That you don't matter without her?"

Sean shook his head, shaking away her words.

"I don't have anyone else." He said it as if it was pitiful. "No family, nothing."

Kara didn't feel pity, though. Just sad. Sad and understanding of what it truly felt like to be entirely and unquestionably alone in the world. Where the urge to disappear was terrifying mostly and only because you knew in your bones that no one would care. But Kara also knew that that conviction, that single certainty, was a lie you clung to. Like the rope that dragged you behind a ship and sliced your fingers, but you knew if you let it so there was no telling where you could end up. Drowning, maybe. Or finding an island. 

"Take it from me," she answered, insides tight with it. "Family could be waiting for you in the most unexpected of places." Kara couldn't help smiling to herself at that, thinly though. She wasn't sure he could even see it, but a thread of guilt tugged at her heart. Why? Well, why she only knew. 

He just scoffed at her, lost in his own heartsick.

"What would you know about it?"

Something suspended in her, some reality, then there was a conviction and without stopping to overthink about it beyond what it merely meant, Kara unbuttoned her shirt and revealed the glowing super-suit beneath, the crest of House El almost glowing in the dark. 

It was a leap of faith, a sign of trust, something that the gasp that left his mouth and the spark that lit in his eyes she knew that he needed. 

"Not everyone thinks I'm wonderful enough to stay with either," she answered quietly.

A tiny furrow creased Sean's brow. And a lump appeared in Kara's throat. It was bigger than it had ever been before. In her heart and her tense stomach, she knew. She already knew. The knowledge stung at the corner of her eyes.

"Really?" 

He asked it so innocently, so childlike, in a way that made her feel the most human she had tonight. Kara's fingertips traced the raised insignia, muscles knowing it's pattern better than her eyes.

"Really." She nodded, letting her own tears fall now and finally letting the lid off of her pot. Steam escaping slowly, gently, no pressure or force behind it, just a choice. A powerful choice. "And it sucks." Kara drew in a heavy, shuddering sigh, pulling all of it, everything she knew and was and had endured and finding the truth in it all again. 

"But the universe has to move forward." It echoed out of her. All their smiles. All their moments. 

Mother. Father. Alura. 

Alex. 

"Pain and loss," her fingers feel from the crest, and she let it stand for itself without self-consciousness. "They define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it's a world or a relationship… Everything has its time. And everything ends." 

That sea smell still sat on the wind, drawing in closer and closer, swelling and ebbing like its tide. 

"You've got a decision to make," Kara explained, the lump in her throat still swollen and sore. "The same way I've got one, every day. My… world tore itself apart. And it left me utterly alone." 

Kara wondered how she could speak it, how she could breathe it out, the way she had every day for years and years, all along weighed underneath it all. It amazed her that she could be here talking. But she knew, truly, that there was a strength in her that hadn't gone. It had just been waiting for her to find it again.

"Everything ends, and it's always sad, but everything begins again too, and that's always good." Her thin voice wavered, she knew he could hear it too. "And you and me?" Kara looked at the space between them pointedly. "We're still here. We're still alive. There's still life for us. A chance for us."

Kara breathed, it finally sinking in. Funny how she never really believed herself unless she had said it to someone else. That is just… made sense. Kara looked up overhead at the night sky again, the one she couldn't really see but knew was so full of stars. There would be swaying branches of the trees in the park too, soft silhouettes in the dark, with a moon above it all. Suddenly, all that was broken in her didn't feel shameful or unspeakable at all, and she didn't want to fight tears or the truth anymore. They all welled up and spilled down her face, and she could only do her best to breathe through it and make herself look the man in the eye. A stranger that wasn't strange at all.

"I don't have all the answers, Sean," she managed, reaching out her hand towards him. "But I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere. I want to help you."

Kara was standing there, shirt unbuttoned, shivering on the sidewalk in the dark, cars driving past them both on the bridge in an endless stream of mixed lights. Red, white and yellow flashes. Knowing, maybe not knowing what they were passing. What they weren't seeing. Just disappearing in their one lives, sorrows and problems, fighting their own battles. Kara could stand here forever. Wait forever, suspended whether or not and waiting. Watching the dark where he could disappear, knowing that he wasn't going to come back—but still watching.

The stars would fade, and the darkness would drain away slowly. Dawn would find her still standing vigil on the dirty sidewalk, her eyes too tired and dry to cry any more. Something in her heart still cracked wide open. Now, in this minute, before all that could exist, Kara wished this horrible night, this life of hers would never end; wished she could stay here just a little longer, with her sparks of hope. But she knew she couldn't. She knew that in a matter of minutes – no, seconds – her world had changed irrevocably. Because nothing had ever felt more pivotal, even though she was too tired to work it all out, her head still just hurt just a little too much.

Her hand reached for him, shaking under the swaying light of all those cars.

He looked at, stared at it, for what felt like an eternity, before he looked back at her face. 

"How?"

Kara smiled, relief pulling the corners up almost painfully.

"There's a program run out of the Luthor Children's hospital."

He shook his head at her answer.

"I'm twenty-one."

"It allows for people up to twenty-five."

Rao bless Lena for that. Still, he hesitated.

"I don't have insurance," he said weakly.

"I've got it on good authority that Lena Luthor doesn't charge for the program," she answered, her words growing quicker and quicker they way they always did when she had an idea. "You'll get a bed, food, treatment. All she asks is that if you're able, you volunteer with the kids." 

He smiled at that, something in his eyes softening and Kara quirked her head to the side in a half-shrug.

"Maybe you could help with Supergirl Story Hour," she finished, drawing a weak laugh from the man. "Just… have a cup of coffee with me, and we'll talk about it."

Her hand was still out, and she risked another step forward again. Close enough now, maybe to grab him. Maybe.

Sean bit his lip, looked to her hand, then back to her face, then her hand and her crest then her face again.

"Why?" He asked, almost bewildered, almost shocked. "Why are you doing this?"

Kara stared at him for a second before she answered.

"Maybe I need you to help save _my_ life."

Kara's voice caught in her throat. It was so tiny. It barely made a dent in the cool night air. But she meant every word, and maybe he knew that too because his icy fingers finally took her hand, a hard grip and shaking.

"Ok."

Kara smiled, helped him off the rail, walked them a few steps back and clasped his shoulder, not letting go of his other hand the entire time. Half believing that it wasn't real, that if she didn't keep that connection, it could all go down a very different path. He was shaking too, looking down at the ground and taking desperate, straggled breaths, almost folding in on himself.

"Ok," he repeated through a breath, before suddenly crashing into and wrapping his arms around her and holding onto her like she was the only thing stopping him from drowning. And Kara didn't feel burdened by it or worse, fulfilled by it, but just war-weary and relating so much she hugged him back just as fiercely, holding him like she wished she could hold Alex and her mom and her father Ruby and Lena and tell them all that she loved them so much and she wanted them so much, and she needed them so much. 

She wasn't even really sure how long they stood there together. Still, it ended up with them both in a shitty diner, drinking terrible coffee and Kara listening and talking for hours and hours about everything and nothing and until dawn leaked up into the air and tinged the building of the city gold and red as she walked him through the front doors of the hospital and helped him fill out the right forms.

And that was good, and it was real, and it enough to help her sleep through the night.

* * *

PLAY

_Kara's face filled the camera as she fumbled it into position._

_"Right, it's going," she moved back from her crouch, towards the centre of the room, taking her place next to an unimpressed looking Alex with a glass of wine in her hand. "Come on."_

_"No," Alex answered, taking a sip of her wine while Kara took a swig of the neon purple drink she was holding._

_"Yeah!" Kara answered back, drunken enthusiasm rolling off her in giddy waves. Almost puppy-like, she left her glass too close to the edge of the coffee table and sat down in the cleared space in the middle of the room._

_"This is stupid!" Alex shook her head again, rejecting Kara's outstretched hand, wine sloshing at the edge of the glass. "You're going to get hurt," she finished grimly, her superiority negated slightly by the slur of her words._

_Kara's face fell, still saddened at the rejection._

_"Why?"_

_"Because you're old!" Alex said far too loudly before hiccoughing. "You're old, and you've solar-flared, and you're drunk."_

_"I'm not old," Kara wrinkled her nose. "You're old!"_

_Alex rolled her eyes._

_"Yeah," she explained. "And I'm drunk too."_

_"No," Kara smiled again, less annoyed now. "That's good that you're drunk, drunk people don't get hurt, they bounce!"_

_Alex snorted at her logic, Kara giggled at the snort, and then both of them devolved into a plea of gut-busting laughter. It took a minute for them to regain their heads, but Kara reached out her hands for Alex again when they did._

_"All right, come on," she begged._

_Alex let out a long-suffering sigh, then took on a 'why not?' attitude, placing her glass next to Kara's and taking Kara's hands with hers._

_"If I fall on you," she warned. "I'm not taking you to the hospital."_

_"Right, ok." Kara shook her head but clutched Alex's hands tightly. She leaned back flat on the ground, bracing her feet against Alex's thighs._

_"Now go," Alex snapped, eager now. "Go!"_

_Kara huffed and then lifted Alex off the ground with her feet, balancing her in the air. Alex's fingers were clenched tight and white around Kara's._

_"I'm flying!" Alex laughed, wobbling in the air. "Like Supergirl!"_

_Kara laughed too at that, face screwed up, trying to concentrate at the same time._

_"Let go!" Alex tried to tug her hands loose. "Let go, Kara!"_

_Kara did, and Alex managed a superhero pose for about a second before her balance was lost and she fell, tumbling into Kara with more snorts, laughter and pained groans._

STOP

PLAY AGAIN

* * *

Facing the sun, Kara felt soft. Warm in its glow. She hadn't done this in so long, hadn't wanted to, but somehow the words, the rituals seemed so right. Like it was all a half-forgotten skill that was just waiting to fill her up again. But she'd be lying if she didn't feel a little… wariness. That there wasn't doubt eating at her, wondering if trying to find some part of herself in this again was stupid. But some ripple, some realisation had hit her today as she cleared out the shelves of her apartment, happening upon the old trinket she had first carved out of rock when she arrived on earth, a scratched and simple offering to Rao. 

Kara realised that in doing nothing deliberately, she had been ignoring her relationship with her faith. In the same way, she had been ignoring her relationships with everyone else in her life. And it wasn't for lack of love or appreciation, but because when things became difficult, when the ugly in her reared its head, it was so much easier to pretend. But by choosing that, she had isolated herself, and those relationships had stopped growing. 

Choosing not to do anything was a form of action, and every action had its consequences. 

Part of the reason she had become Supergirl, to begin with, was that it allowed her to be clear and free, but now she was clouded with more doubt and loss then she knew what to do with. But something, somewhere, she'd rebound the part of herself that knew that balance was possible. That peace was possible. And maybe this was a way for her to find some clarity again. 

"Though we go forth alone," Kara whispered, eyes closed and her open palms resting upwards on her folded knew. "Our soul unites us under Rao's gladsome rays. We are never lost, never afraid, for we shrink not under the sun of righteousness."

It was a prayer for purpose—a prayer for herself.

"Rao binds us to those we love; he gives us strength when we have none." She breathed out the words, almost seeing the colours of them dance through the panes of light through her window. "And in the darkest places, he guides us. For Rao sees all, feels all, his love eternal. Rao protects us so we might protect others." 

Not all of it was good. A lot of it wasn't. Krypton was a broken, ravaged planet. Deeply entrenched in a caste system that taught pruning instead of uncontrolled growth. That suppressed with a rigidity that reflected everything else in their society. A whole world bound for doom from their arrogance and denial. There was so much confusion to have all of that hacked away from her before she had a chance to understand fully. Childish naivety just starting to waver before it all went wrong so fast. And then everything was gone, and Clark was an adult and so alien, and she was alone on a world that didn't want her or need her and all Kara was left with was the ragged final breaths of a people that had probably done far more bad than good for the universe. With parents that she had to learn weren't necessarily good people and a life whose direction she thought she wanted, maybe was never really her choice at all. 

Alex had been her beacon through all of that. The only real, honest thing. Incapable of hiding what she felt towards Kara, she was… the only family that had never betrayed her. But there was so much anger there too. So much resentment. And guilt. It weighed her down, tied around her ankles like iron chains, dragging her further and further to the bottom of a dark, miserable ocean. Just crushed more and more and more and more. 

"And we shall rise," she finished, opening her eyes, blinking at the light, almost as if her eyes were surprised to find it. "A fire in his heart, burning and free."

Kara had hoped that she'd feel some release in this, but instead, there was still just confusion. The words were hers, were her people's and she wanted to believe that they would connect her still to the parts of them that were good. To what she meant them to mean. Kara reached for the token she had placed on the ground in front of her, tracing her thumb over the scored lines with a sigh. So many years had passed, and she was still chasing the same feeling she'd tried to give herself when she'd made it.

"Kara?"

She blinked, turning her head at the voice, surprised that she had been so lost in her thoughts she hadn't heard Ruby use her key for Kara's apartment and come in the door. Kara half turned, fingers closing around the token and raised her knee to her chin, wrapping her arms around her leg as she watched Ruby watch her.

"Hey, how was your weekend?"

Ruby was scanning the room, not hard to notice how much had changed since she'd last been here. Kara wasn't ashamed at the stripped bareness of it all, but she was still glad she'd cleaned up the glass and dusted. One of Ruby's personality hallmarks was that she didn't comment on obvious things quickly. She was a noticer though, and even an idiot (which Ruby most definitely wasn't) would know that the sudden exorcism of Alex meant something. She didn't try to hide her looking. 

"Good," Ruby stepped towards her, backpack sliding down to the floor. "What're you doing?"

For a brief pause, Kara wondered if she should tell her before realising how absurd that was. It wasn't like she needed or wanted to hide her religion. But it was just strange to talk about something she kept so private simply because she didn't have anybody else to talk about it with. 

"I'm praying." Kara gestured for Ruby to sit on the floor opposite her. "To Rao. Asking for guidance."

Ruby sat cross-legged, almost precisely mirroring Kara's earlier position, a questioning crease between her eyes that made Kara want to smooth it away with her thumb the same way she felt about Lena's.

"You're religious?"

Kara nodded, then shrugged, the felt awkward about that too.

"Yeah," she scratched behind her ear, some nervous gesture. "I kind of lost touch with it after I arrived on earth. But when…"

How much time could past, and still Kara found herself stumbling over the words. Body worried, maybe, that there would be yet another unexploded bomb triggered if she said it out loud. Fifty times a day she could say it, but on the fifty-first, it could clinch a vice around her heart.

"When my sister died," she managed finally, looking down at her closed fist, x-raying to check on the stone, almost worried it might've disappeared. "I found myself drifting, and it was a way to find my centre again."

A way to. Hadn't got her there yet though. It was a gut punch to have to fumble for that connection, too, when it used to come so easy. 

Ruby didn't speak for a bit, starting at the floor in front of her with a concentrated look, before looking back up, watching Kara curiously, head tilted.

"But isn't it hard when you're like… the only one left?"

Kara blinked, anticipating the usual stab of…. It didn't come, which was strange, and relieving. Maybe this was just another one of those unburdening moments, or a chance to share, to teach, overrode everything else.

"My cousin does his best to learn," she answered, her tone a little cooler then she wished talking about Clark. "But he's never been as connected because he was raised without it. I think he feels like it's not really his to claim."

It wasn't his fault, not really. Having access to it all through the fortress's codex just wasn't the same as having lived in it. Grown-up with it. More then, religion, or a culture. But a way of life. But whenever Kara had tried to talk about it, wanted to get him to care her just smiled and brushed her off—trying to relate to her ideas of family and community with his apple pie, mid-west upbringing. Clark couldn't help how he was raised, Christianity gracing all the walls of his childhood home, but it all felt a bit like rubbing salt in the wound. Like not only was her people and world gone, but this new one had taken that chance too. She got too frustrated with him, she knew. Frowned too much when he didn't understand the holiness of a phrase he uttered to relate, or the way she winced at his nasal and rough accent speaking their tongue. Clark wasn't stupid. She knew that he saw between the lines of what she wasn't saying and just withdrew out of politeness.

"Is it?"

Kara frowned, feeling worse because in her angry moments she asked the same question herself.

"Of course," she murmured, opening her hand and staring down at the hand-carved marks on the stone. So childlike and earnest and seeking. "It's his birthright. Just because he was raised without it, doesn't mean it isn't his."

It would always be his to claim. He would always be Kryptonian. He would always be born under the light of Rao even if he didn't want it even if she hadn't done enough to make him feel worthy. There was a deep wound between them, one that they never really addressed. Faults and misunderstandings. Both with the wrong ideas of what they'd dreamed the other to be. It had never been properly addressed, not really, but it had been soothed by time and their dual intentions around not _pushing_ too hard. 

And his silent hand on her shoulder during the funeral had made her feel so much. She was still digesting it.

"Can anyone be… what you are?"

Ruby wasn't meeting Kara's eyes, staring down and away at an old coffee cup on the table, attempting to appear her usual carefree self. Kara smiled at the attempted aloofness, and eased her body into a crossed-legged position, leaned in to explain.

"The religion of Krypton is called Raoism."

Ruby looked up then, curiosity dancing in her eyes, cup inspection forgotten.

"And can you have new people?" She asked. "So you're not the only one left?"

Kara's stomach did a little somersault a the thought, the pull of the wish for that conjuring images in her mind of a real temple, with enough members to pray properly on holy days. Of Kryptonian food and stories of struggle and strength being told and learned.

"That's complicated," she answered slowly, trying not to say the wrong thing. When Ruby frowned, her mouth opening with more questions, Kara let out a breath and fleshed out a simple explanation. "People can… but to accept Rao is to become Kryptonian. It's not just a religion. They have to embrace Kryptonian history; it's culture."

She wasn't a religious leader, nor a cultural one, but though she knew it wasn't common for aliens to follow the Book of Rao, it wasn't an easy conversion. There was a wealth of knowledge to learn, rotes to memorise, rituals to follow. And even after all that, there were still Kryptonians who didn't view converts as legitimate. Not appreciative of the struggle because their ancestors never lived it. Because it wasn't their people.

Personally, Kara thought that was the biggest load of bullshit, even then. More an excuse to be a gatekeeping exclusionist then admit that everyone was worthy enough to want to relate with Rao.

Not that any of that discourse mattered anymore, considering she was the only follower of Rao left as far as she was aware.

"So a human can become Kryptonian?"

Kara hesitated again at Ruby's question, wondering if it was her place to answer. But then, if no her, who? It was like she a religious consensus to debate the topic on hand.

"It's complicated."

It was an awkward answer, but an honest one. Kara sometimes wondered if she should be making more efforts to make people aware of Raoism. It had trickled down somewhat, small pockets of theologians taking up the cause to study extinct or endangered alien religions. And of course, given that both Superman and Supergirl were Kryptonian gave it a shiny lustre that made it more tokenly popular than other species'. But it wasn't like a pile of academics pouring over the Book of Rao were suddenly going to have a more in-depth insight into the religion and spread said insight to the world better then she was.

Ruby seemed to ruminate over her answer for a long enough while for Kara to wonder why she was asking these questions.

"So, do you believe in like a heaven?"

Kara shrugged.

"We believe in the afterlife, yes."

Ruby looked back down at her shoes, scuffing them a little against the floor.

"Do you think humans can go there?"

Ah. So that was why she was asking.

"Ruby," Kara answered, feeling less apprehensive now, her expression softening. "Raoism is more focused on this life than the one next. Everyone is welcomed in the afterlife." She took Ruby's hand gently, easing it open to stop her digging her nails into her palm until she drew blood. "If you're not a good person here and now, then you will be further away from Rao for eternity."

Ruby didn't react to her words, beyond an almost imperceptible squeeze around Kara's finger. She just stayed quiet, lost in her thoughts. Kara stayed quiet too, not forcing any more on Ruby then what she wanted to know.

"Lena's an atheist."

Kara knew that. Of all the religious persuasions or non, Lena could have it fitted her best and made the most sense. Though her whole aura also screamed Catholic upbringing, not that Kara had ever said that aloud. Maybe other people in Kara's position would think it was sad for her to be in a relationship with someone when their views on faiths were, literally, worlds apart. But Kara was never going to be in a relationship with someone who had her same beliefs. It had always been far more critical to her that the person she did end up with believed whatever they did with some sense of conviction and thought out justification—some reason as to why. Lena was looked for meaning in her life in her's and those around her; Kara did too; one of those just happened to be Rao's.

"I know."

Ruby just seemed to grow stiller at her response.

Kara took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to say what she wanted the way she wanted.

"A life, well-lived, is its own reward, that's what I believe." After all, people and civilisations had argued over everything else forever. What could be more tangible than just trying to be a good person? 

"Heaven and hell aren't kryptonian concepts," Kara continued, happier now that Ruby was looking at her properly again. "Not in the way you probably think. They're the same place. The difference between them depends on people, reflecting their souls' quality and the way their lives were lived. It doesn't have anything to do with divine judgment after death. Even in its discussion of death, Raoism is first about celebrating life, and teaching people how to live well."

At least, that what it was supposed to be about. That was what Kara wanted it to be, and if she was going to get one perk from being a sole survivor, it was making that choice. 

Her full answer seemed to satisfy something in Ruby, her face twisting out from a knot of pain and uncertainty into something more peaceful. Kara felt lighter for having helped.

"What do you do when people die?" Ruby's curiosity seemed to demand she continue. "Do you bury them?"

Kara shook her head, feeling mournful and yet equally at peace.

"We return them to the sun. We pray and send them to the sun. We mourn for two weeks. We give up daily toil and lend our hearts to the loved ones making their journey home to Rao. We light their way. We do this, so they don't walk alone in the dark."

Kara still remembered setting her Aunt's casket off on its journey. The longest journey any of them had ever taken, back to the sun they also called God, so very far away. 

"Do you wish that you could have done that with Alex?"

Kara felt things; she heard them all the way through her bones and her cells and beyond. Some impactful thing that had her screaming in a crowded room with no one looking up. But it was with a truth of conviction that had Kara shaking her head firmly now.

"No," she answered. "We buried Alex her way. And I'm mourning her the only way I can.”

Alex hadn't been the most observantly religious person. Kara couldn't even remember the last time she went to temple by herself. But some things meant something to her. Things that she did or wanted or held dear. Like the menorah that had once been her grandmother's, that Alex had kept in her second safe, not the decoy one. Like the week she and Kara had been in Washington on business and Alex had disappeared for a day, only to return eerily quiet, Kara only finding the ticket stub for the Holocaust Memorial Museum fallen to the carpet in the next morning. But mostly it was innocuous things, like the way Alex would laugh with Peters and Davis in the break room of the DEO, promises to one-up each other's family's latke recipes. 

It had been for Eliza too. So much of it, even though it'd never be enough to make up for what Kara had stolen from her.

Kara tried to let the thoughts leech from her immediate mind, seep back underneath the bordered-up area she had stored all of that behind. She diverted her attention back to Ruby, taking her in slowly. They talked about a lot together, easily too. Her relationship with Ruby was one of the few things she didn't question, happily so. They didn't talk about Alex much, though, or Sam. Strange that Kara's thoughts were so often consumed by thoughts of the space that used to be Sam's in Lena's life, but not for Ruby. 

Was that a good thing? Or not.

"Lena's happy now, you know."

Maybe they were just too similar. 

Kara weighed the words, the earnest look in Ruby's eyes. The quiet desperation, the nervous uptick of her heart. Children were far more observant then people gave them credit for. She and Lena weren't talking about it, were pointedly not. Things, whatever they were, were festering and Ruby knew it. But it wasn't Ruby's job to… to…

Kara looked at Ruby, and she saw Lena, the same age with a boot of suppression and self-latching on her neck. She saw herself; soul razed to the ground. And she saw Sam, rejected into a cruel world with a whole other life to care for. Three women that had all lost their mothers at a young age. It was an inherited trauma, with plenty of her own on top. 

Kara couldn't change the past, take any of that away, but she wanted, needed, Ruby to know that she didn't need to support the adults in her life emotionally. Far too young for so much shouldered responsibility. 

Life was too unfair for Kara to be that unkind.

"Are _you_ happy, Ruby?"

Rao, she'd hated it when people had asked her that when she was a teenager. Are you happy, Kara? Are you ok, Kara? It all came with kid gloves, cloying speak and pitied gazes. If she wasn't the weird orphan foreigner loser in school, she was the one they all 'had to make a little room for' at home. Alex resenting her had been isolating, but no less than that. At least when they'd started to warm up to each other, it felt honest and natural. Alex always had that ability to care deeply without making it seem like she gave too much of a shit at all. Maybe it helped that she was just as fucked up as Kara in her way. 

Ruby ducked her head, red crawling up her neck, and Kara wanted to smack herself in the head, fearing she'd repeated the wrong thing. But something was twisted up in Ruby's face too like she was holding away a flood of emotions that Kara's question had inspired.

"I feel like I'm disappointing her."

Ruby's voice was strained, almost a whisper, like she was admitting her darkest failing. 

"Your mom?"

Ruby hesitated before she nodded.

Kara's heart plummeted, mostly out of revolted relief because she understood this so well. At least well enough to maybe help. Maybe.

Maybe, she always needed that qualifier now. A foot in the half-empty glass just in case. Bracing for her own failure. 

"Why?"

Ruby didn't answer quickly. She was looking away from Kara instead, eyes scanning over the series of photos on Kara's walls. Her and Alex, again and again. Layered around them like a protective shield of happier times. Or a sad reminder of what used to be. 

"Well, there's Lena, who's just, a literal genius and a CEO." Ruby's answer finally came out, sounding stuttered, manufactured and deflective all at once. Scoring across the pain like a jagged trench, but wearing it like a shield all the same. "And there's you," Ruby nodded at Kara. "An actual superhero. I'm not like, comparing myself to you guys, but Mom…" 

Ruby sniffed, and a tear slipped down her cheek, one she scrubbed away in the same angry way that Lena did when she was ashamed of herself for cracking under pressure, internal and external. 

"I'm one year away from being her age when she had me." Ruby's voice bubbled now, a precursor to something hysterical. A hysterical bucket of acid. "One year. She was seventeen, and she had me, and she went to Harvard, and she worked two jobs, and she became like a super-badass businesswoman. And I'm just…" 

Ruby gestured weakly at herself, her shoulders dropping.

"I've got no ambition; I have no direction, I know I'd never be able to handle having a kid right now if ever." Ruby's eyes shined with even more tears, cricking her head back like she could get gravity to help stop them from falling. "I get phone anxiety for fuck's sake!"

"Ruby…" Kara wanted to pull her into the tightest of hugs, but Ruby shook any intention off, raising a hand slightly, blocking the space between them.

"Sorry," she apologised. Kara wanted to tell her how unnecessary it was, how she didn't need to. But Ruby was Lena's daughter, and Kara knew that it wouldn't be helpful. "I've not really done anything," she finished, sounding lost. "And I don't think I will. It's so unfair."

Kara drew in a harsh breath, feeling like a million paper-cuts had shredded her lungs.

"Why?"

Was she asking for Ruby? For herself? For them all?

"Because if mom was still alive, she could have done so much more," Ruby said it with such dullness, it terrified Kara to her core. A long shrug too, just accepting her own words as truth. "Especially now that she didn't have to look after me the same way she did, she would have changed the world."

No, Kara wanted to scream. You can't know that at all. None of us can no that. But that wasn't an easy answer; no answer would be. To a mind ensnared in such internally directed angry, the truth was but a lie undiscovered. But it was still the truth, and she would speak it. 

Kara reached for Ruby's shoulders now, leaving her trinket on the ground, taking them with both her hands and holding back from a bruising grip. Barely. Ruby's blinked at the sudden contact, her mouth gapped, but Kara was incensed. Furious. Not at Ruby, but at their ever being a place, time, multiverse where such an incredible, gentle, kind and vivacious child could ever think such things about herself. Kara may be cradled in her feelings of internal torment, but she'd fight the world before she let Ruby believe this without also knowing that Kara didn't. 

That Kara saw her, believed in her.

"Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty," Kara emphasised those words hard, a sensation swooping through her like she falling off the tallest of buildings, not knowing if her powers would work. "It's not the time that matters. It's the person. And you're a good person."

Ruby's eyebrows furrowed, and the desperate need to impress her point ballooned in Kara's chest.

"You're not supposed to have it all figured out right now." Kara managed, and Ruby's eyes meet Kara's with some spark of humour in them at the old platitude, and suddenly Kara' 's heart was squeezing, and she took it because it was something. "I still don't have it all figured out," Kara huffed, that of all things drew a smile from Ruby. 

"Your purpose in life shouldn't just be measuring up to some barometer you or others have set for you." Kara felt a little heady, suddenly. She had to glance at one of her closer photos of Alex to steady herself, staring blindly at the frame instead of its contents as if the silver metal would give her the same answers she seemed to be full of right now. "You're not your mom. You're not supposed to live her life. You're supposed to live yours. Whatever that is, I know it's going to be great. You don't have to prove your worth to anyone." 

Ruby bit her lip and her smile cracked through, toothy and so, thankfully, accepting that Kara swallowed, hard. Then nodded, her hand moving from Ruby's shoulders to cupping her face gently. Passing through a sudden gauntlet of fucked-upedness in her own soul, misfiring a few brain cells, before she found what she needed and said it. 

"But you don't just give up. You don't just let things happen. You make a stand, and you say no." Kara was strangely aware of her breath as she spoke, pushing the words out. Hammering them home. "You have the guts to do what's right, even when everyone else just runs away. You fight for your happiness." 

Kara's brain was all over the place, and she doubted she would sleep well that night, she could physically feel how much of her she was leaving on the table with this, but she'd only re-doubled her nerve saying it. Especially now, when something Kara thought might be pride flickered awake with Ruby looking at her like she'd just told her the most profound news of her life. 

Kara's jitteriness, her uncertainty, definitely eased with that. She dropped her hand, letting them fall to rest back in her lap.

"I'm sure… that's what your mother would have dreamed for you."

It's what her's would, anyway.

Kara's heart had soared, and her stomach had churned all at once. She felt elated, and sick and stretched with the whole kaleidoscope of emotions this conversation had summoned, but looking at Ruby for a few more beats she realised that the pride wasn't for herself, but the wondering girl in front of her.

Ruby, for her part, looked as wrung out as Kara felt. Absorbing Kara's final words with a strange expression before she let out a breath, took one in, and let it out again.

"I'm still sad sometimes," she admitted, shrugging. "But yeah, I'm happy too." She looked Kara square in the eye, the corner of her mouth twisting into a smirk. "Don't you think it's weird that everyone in the family's in therapy? I think we should get a group discount."

Kara rolled her eyes, a flickering need not to tell Ruby her recent therapy choice, before she reached out and shoved at Ruby's shoulder, knocking her off balance and leaving her laughing.

"You got that sense of humour from Lena, didn't you?" Kara asked redundantly.

"Oh yeah," Ruby nodded, bouncing up and standing tall like a quick-spring. She stretched her arms before she finished. "Mom's entire repertoire was like knock knock and dad jokes."

Kara cracked her neck, picking her stone up before her brain finally caught up to her ears, and she looked at Ruby sharply, disbelievingly.

"You think I'm a part of your family?"

Ruby shrugged, jerked her head in a half-nod as if what she'd said so casually hadn't caused Kara's heart to vault into her throat. Or repressed memories, old and pained memories, new and raw, didn't just rattle viciously at the back of her mind like a washing machine running with a brick inside it. Like the word didn't send a stab of want straight through her body, make her want to cry and scream and check again, just in case, like she was right now. 

"Well, yeah," Ruby added, giving her a weird look and a smile that had Kara rushing to compose her face. "Of course you are." 

Kara bit her cheek, looked away for a second and when she looked back, Ruby was staring down at her with more understanding.

"Why do you think I want you to move in?" She asked. "You're like, the best person that I know, apart from Lena, and you've always got my back. You're really good for her and me."

Kara swallowed, looked away again and pretended to fidget with her stone. Rolling it around and around in her palm, smoothing it even more then it had been after all these years. She tried to think of what to say to that, what to do. In the end, she just stood up too and mimicked Ruby's stretch. 

"You're too smart for your age." Kara breezed past Ruby as she said it, aiming for the fridge she pulled out a carton of juice, retrieved two glasses from the cupboard, filled them and slid one across the counter in Ruby's direction.

"Yeah, I know," Ruby answered smugly, draining her glass.

Kara shook her head, smiling at Ruby's smile, shining through now, lighting up her features.

"You also know it's cool just to be a kid, right?" Kara teased, laughing when Ruby poked her tongue out.

"Kara, we sneak ice-cream at three in the morning together," Ruby reminded her. "Do _you_ know it's ok to be an adult?"

Kara tried to project a disgruntled air, but now, she was just basking in this.

"Touche."

Ruby took on an air of even greater self-satisfaction, and the conversation drifted away towards soccer tryouts, a feud with a co-lead in the upcoming school play and Ruby's rather frustrating attempts to abolish detention. Kara listened with avid interest, leaning into the feeling, as the sunlight spilled further and further in the room.

* * *

Someone tried to kill her. 

They'd managed to get through the lobby, security, up the elevator, down the corridor, past Jess and into her office and fired a shot. Someone had tried to kill her and Kara hadn't known. Hadn't been told. She'd been on the other side of the world following a stupid lead for something even more stupid instead. On the other side of the world while some evil, the scum of the earth had tried to murder Lena. 

And Lena hadn't even called her. She'd flown straight to her apartment and had gotten changed and had a shower and made a cup of tea all before she'd turned on the television and saw it flashing across the bottom of the screen as breaking fucking news. Kara was a superhero and a journalist, and she had to find out about an assassination attempt on her girlfriend that hadn't even confirmed if there had been causalities. 

Outright panic insisted that she fly straight to Lena's office, but fear demanded that she go to the hospital instead. Or what if… what if….

What if Lena-

How would she tell-

Confirmed. No casualties.

Kara knew fear. Knew it deep. Every way that it could unfold. Learned it in all the simple ways, daily and trying new things. Moving to a new city, starting a new job, a speech at school. She knew it before a fight, knew it during. Knew it with her identity. 

Just, knew it. Stuck in that pod, an eternity of silence in the Phantom Zone. Crash-landing on earth. Being alone. Alone. Losing her family, her people, her way of life. Never fitting in, never being normal and not being loveable enough, not being good enough, not earning it enough, not deserving it enough. Fear for them, all the people she couldn't, didn't, did, should have, might have, nearly saved. 

The fear sat quietly, eroding the person she was born to be. What would start as a contortion of my stomach became smothering by an invisible hand. Breathing could become erratic, deep, then shallow. She'd fight it. She'd fight the feeling as her body writhed to be free or shut down entirely. Parts of her could get stronger, learn how to cope, part of her weakened. To recover, each new version of fear needed a name. Fear of failure. Pit against the fear of never trying, of failing through cowardice. It was how she kept moving forward, why others thought her brave. But all she knew was how to push through fear better than others. Make forwards less painful than hiding in the shadows.

Then there was the newest fear, the one she'd known all her life but only just named. The before fear. The split-second between something going wrong and realising what had happened. The smallest pocket of time that defied logic and laws. It was in the moment the window of her pod turned off its rightful path, spinning and spinning. A Krypton alive in one rotation of it, burning the next. It was where the pod's door had been ripped off, and a grown man was offering her his hand, and she took it in awe and terror before seeing that crest and realising that her only reason for getting on that pod and leaving the rest of her family to die was gone. Fear like that was your blood screaming in your veins, hearing and gun and thinking this was it, before realising that you weren't dead at all, but your sister wasn't moving on the ground.

Fear like that was having her eyes open and looking at you, but she'd never see you again. The kind of fear that made you realise what fear really was.

Kara couldn't remember flying to L-Corp, she couldn't remember landing on Lena's balcony or walking in. The first thing she remembered was the office. Broken glass, paper's scattered, a painting on the wall dropped to the floor—a struggle. But none of that mattered once Kara's eyes zeroed in on Lena, sitting on the couch and being tended to by a paramedic, debriefing her head of security with a glass of water in her hand. Kara's took in her blood-spotted shirt, her split lip, the cut on her forehead, the shadow of a bruise forming under her eyes and encircling her wrists. It made Kara's blood run cold, made her feel dizzy. Made her feel overwhelmed, and for the first time in a long time since she'd lost Alex, Kara found a new word for her fear and had no idea what to do.

But when Lena looked at her, and Kara couldn't see that same fear in her eyes, she found herself shaking instead, so _angry_. 

"How did this happen?" Kara demanded, the air around her almost crackling with her ferocity. Nobody even had to answer before her eyes turned to Lena's head of security, fury pounding in her blood.

The man's eyes widened under her glare.

"Supergirl-"

She wasn't going to listen to excuses.

"You're supposed to be the best in the world at what you do." Kara stalked forward, slow, deliberate, allowing the sound of his speeding heart to fill her ears. Her jaw was clenched so tightly; Kara wondered she didn't hear her teeth crack between pauses. "And between you and all your security, not a single one person managed to catch an assassin taking the _fucking_ elevator?"

He was walking backwards now, half-stumbling. Kara almost wished he would fall.

"Supergirl-"

Kara's eyes burned, stinging smoke filled her nostrils, and she grabbed his shirt, practically slamming him into the corner she'd pressed him into.

"What would it have taken for you to do your job!?" Her voice boomed and cracked like thunder. "Her brains splattered across the ceiling?"

"SUPERGIRL!"

The cry broke through, somehow. It hadn't come from the man at all, he was just staring at her in terror, or the paramedic who looked ready to quit his job, but from Lena. Standing now and facing Kara with so much of her fury, the primal rage that had taken root inside of Kara faltered enough for her to let go her grip, step back and let the other man flee from the room. Lena and Kara glared at each for a drawn-out second before Lena waved for the paramedic to leave too, which he did just as quickly.

After the door closed behind him, Lena's expression faltered a little, a flash of pain crossing over. Kara noted how she wobbled on her feet and was favouring her right leg, and she felt like she was going to choke. Her hands clean the final spots of blood on Lena's skin and inspect every inch of her.

Kara faltered, panic and guilt sticking hard in her throat. 

She should have been her. She should have stopped this. Kara was flushed and helpless and embarrassed. She floundered, trying desperately to think of some comfort she could offer to make this all stop.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

Kara's eyes were hot, and they hurt, but she swore she must have misheard. She wasn't miss-seeing though, Lena's face was enraged and red, and it was directed at her. 

"Me?" She rounded, awkwardness banished for frustration and her own renewed sense of rage. "You could have died today, Lena! Died because of his incompetence."

That so-called head of security should be counting his blessings she didn't charr him to the spot, he'd certainly earned the treatment. Kara couldn't understand why Lena wasn't angrier, why she wasn't rushing to Kara and just being scared. Scared the way Kara was.

"It wasn't their fault," Lena rounded back, wincing again and raising a hand to clutch her side. 

Kara's automatic instant was to step forward, but she was halted immediately when Lena held her other hand out between them, demanding distance. It made Kara feel like her heart was just slushing around her chest, a brick in a vat of waste. Her fury spiked. 

"Then, whose?" She shouted. "Yours?"

Lena let out a pained breath, closed her eyes for a second.

"Nobody's." She shook her head. "It happened, I'm fine."

Kara became very still. All of her hot anger, rage, fury, swam out her in a quick flood that left a blank numbness behind before freezing over.

"How can you say that?" She snapped cruelly. "Look at you. You're not fine.

"Kara-"

"What the _fuck_ is wrong with you?" Kara chastised, cold and vicious, flat and level. "You almost died, and I had to hear about it through the news. Through the fucking news." Kara took a step forward, considered, then uncaring in a blur or super-speed had the watch off of Lena's hand and brandished in her face. "Why do you think I gave you this? Why?"

"I can take care of myself!" Lena snarled, red-faced as she snatched back the signal watch from Kara.

"You almost died!" Kara snorted. "Why don't you care? Why doesn't your life matter to you?"

Lena jerked back liked she'd been slapped, and Kara could almost hear the threads of everything that was between them snapping. Cord, by cord, by cord. But she couldn't bring herself to feel remorse for it. Not if they were the cost of Lena caring about her own life. That would always matter more than them.

"My life does matter to me," Lena said, and for once Kara brought herself to listen. Lena's whole body was wound tight, shoulders straight, jaw clenched hard. When she spoke, it was slow, careful, but there was heat behind every syllable, enough to burn straight through Kara. "But this _is_ my life, Kara. I've dealt with this for longer then I've known you."

"And that makes it ok?" Kara couldn't believe what Lena was telling her. That she felt what she was saying was right, even surrounded in an entire room full of evidence to the contrary. "That means I shouldn't worry? What happens if one day I have to tell Ruby that she's lost another parent?"

It was too far. Kara knew the second she said it because Lena's face turned as blank as a stone. An apology stayed on the end of Kara's teeth, ready to be fired, but she swallowed it down, forced herself quiet even as shame began to eat at her.

"Like I'm the one out there day after day courting death?" Lena finally said, brutally accusing. "Jesus, Kara. I sit in board meetings. You fight super-villains with your bare hands."

Despair filled her and Kara clenched her fists.

"I'm Supergirl."

It was a truth. The only truth that never left her. Lena didn't even look angry with her when she said it though. Something worse was in her eyes. Pity. 

"And you're not invulnerable either."

They never used to be like this before, and it made Kara want to sob or break something or both. Kara tried to steady herself, find some way back through this conversation to what it was supposed to be. 

She took a step forward, reaching for the watch gently this time.

"I gave you this so I could protect you-"

Lena threw it at the wall. Impassioned, maybe. Frustrated, definitely. But the crack it made when it landed and bounced to the floor stopped everything, the time on its face and in the room. Images of this morning came to her when things had been slow and soft. Kara's eyes had drifted shut, fingers tracing strange shapes on the bare skin of Lena's back. It felt as shattered as the glass face of the watch now. And this, more than the argument, seemed to be the final note of their song.

"I'm not some damsel in a tower." It felt like an eternity; it took that long for Kara to drag her eyes away from the broken thing on the ground and then to Lena's face when she continued to speak. "You can't protect everyone."

Unease coloured her voice as she said it like she was tiptoeing around an unexploded bomb. It made Kara rankle, and tears prick at the corner of her eyes. 

"I've lost too many people." The fight in her was gone, replaced with overwhelming distress. Some animal instinct to protect, protect, protect flaring angry and neon. "I'm not going to lose you too."

Kara felt a ghost in her life more often than not. Either angry and alone, grief-struck and lonely, or trying not to show how desperately she wanted to be with Lena. Right now, even part of those was colliding like a horrific crash, too fascinating to look away from, and Lena was watching her with such naked sincerity that Kara's stomach plummeted through and out of her. She hadn't hidden any of it well at all.

"I'm not Alex."

Kara's eyes screwed shut, the only action she could take against the scream of agony building up in her throat. Tears flooded past anyway, pouring down her face, pulled from the deep well of failure and loss and that same, terrible, fear. 

"And I'm not Sam! I'll never be Sam. I'm Kara. I'm me."

She'd meant it to be cutting, harsh, but it fell from her lips weak, airy. Shockingly, embarrassingly, breathtakingly revealing.

When Kara opened her eyes again, she felt small and shamed. Lena looked at her with a pitying realisation that seemed less sudden and more an 'of course that's your issue'.

"I know that. "

That soft, gentle acknowledgment didn't help. Nor the way that Lena was reaching out for her now as if Kara needed or wanted her comfort. Kara pulled back, glowering, and Lena flinched at the action.

"Oh, I know you do." Kara walled herself up, brick by brick. "I know it too well."

She gave Lena one, pained, final look, before turning away from her.

"Next time you almost die, maybe call me," she drawled, feeling particularity poisonous. "Maybe let me know, maybe care. Maybe just look outside of yourself for two damn seconds and realise that the world doesn't revolve around you."

Lena didn't yell back; she didn't snap. 

Her words were quiet. Pleading.

"Kara, don't run away."

It was an opportunity to walk things back. Lena looked angry, but there was a pleading edge to her voice too.

She was good. Too good for this. Desperate even after everything Kara's already done to ruin things for them for an excuse to fix this, to forgive her.

But what was the point, when it was only a matter of time before she realised Kara was right? That the awful slings of mud she was throwing couldn't be something that could just pass. That there was something desperately wrong with Kara to feel them at all.

"I have to go," Kara managed, though it was hard to push the words past the lump in her throat. She felt suddenly totally drained, shameful, pathetic and tiny and she couldn't stand another moment of Lena looking at her like that.

She turned on her heel and stumbled out on to the balcony, her launch into the sky far wobblier then usual, but at least away and into the night where she didn't have to ask herself if Lena would want to follow her.

* * *

Her weekend was ruined, simply put.

Kara spent Saturday feeling restless, stung. The pressure inside swells and swells, throbbed at her temples, made her skin feel too tight. Nia dropped by later in the evening with pizza, who told her that Kara was… well, Kara didn't know. It was definitely a not so subtle attempt to check on her, and Kara bit her head off. Nia took it in stride, like she usually did. It makes Kara feel worse, angry at Lena for affecting her this way, even more, irate at herself for being so affected.

Kara ate the pizza alone and felt miserable and waited for something to change. Nothing did, except the guilt settling over her gets stuck in her throat. 

Sunday came next, which she couldn't remember. She thought she slept through most of it, but she remembered knocking at her door. Knocking and vibrating, whenever she checked her phone, there were no missed calls or messages. That made her even angrier. Wanting to be left alone, but hating that she was being. Eventually, Kara just tried to fall back asleep, but her head felt like a shaken bottle of soda. All pressure and bubbles, far too hard for what a liquid should be and far too dangerous for her to even remember exactly which disparaging things she was thinking about herself and everyone else.

Monday, Kara didn't go to work. She didn't even bother to call in sick, which was a dangerous line to walk after everything Cat had done for her, but destroying her life through abject apathy seemed like a viciously good idea in the morning, even if by midday if felt like the worst. 

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

Friday and Kara got a call as Supergirl. Something she didn't want to ignore. For sickly selfish reasons, like patching herself up with being needed and having the chance to solve something physically. Her head definitely wasn't on straight, and the fight took more out of her because she was distracted, and then all it took was a single mocking comment from the rouge metahuman's mouth for Kara's hands to curl into fists at her sides. She could feel that familiar buzzing, tension coiling under her skin, a storm brewing in the ropy chords of her muscles. It was almost a relief, the inevitability of violence. A language she was fluent in, space she knew how to navigate.

Kara felt like a thorn or a splinter, wedged under the skin of everyone she knew, the wound of her puss-filled and inflamed. The only way she felt close to anyone anymore was this way, digging her way, and if it hurts, that was fine. Kara hurt every damn day, and she wasn't above spreading the pain around a little.

She slammed into her opponent, watched the mocking drain from their eyes and turn to fear, knowing that Supergirl had tipped the line of what she was willing to do today. Kara's hand clenched around their wrists, crunching hard enough to hear them crack a little, finally stopping their ability to fling fire. She left them cradling their arms, dropping them like a sack of potatoes in the crater that she didn't realise they'd, or rather, she'd made. She had blinked looking around, realising a small ring of people watching her, but they most definitely weren't cheering. And the camera's trained at her quickly made her entire body crawl like she'd just been caught climbing out of a mud pit. She spared a single glance at the metahuman, still unmoving, but whimpering, and tried to make herself feel bad. Instead, she just felt bitter that it hadn't been enough to make her feel anything about herself, one way or another.

But there was something else thrumming under her skin when she left and took a long flight around the city, not wanting to handle questions, something sharp and urgent. Kara took deep, scouring breaths of cold autumn air and tried to pin down the feeling, so she could take it apart, figure it out.

The violent buzz didn't leave her when she watched the news later, all the speculation on whether Supergirl had gone too far or if she was turning bad, a hot flash of anger roared up from the bottom of her gut. But there wasn't mocking anywhere in these stories, just fear and acknowledgment that while it was all well and good having Supergirl as the city's protector, unregulated behaviour swings were something to be concerned about. There were still gritty remnants of the fight still under her fingernails, and her whole body was taut as a wire, but she forced herself to bleed the tension out of her muscles. 

Maybe they had a point.

All that harsh, prickly buzzing fizzled out over the next week. What was leftover is flat and syrupy, leather feeling tame and toothless. She stayed the rest of it in her apartment, not even living for food, instead deliberately keeping herself underfeed so she could feel listless, which was kind of miserable and pathetic. At least it allowed her to rearrange her furniture there and back again, and figure out how many hours it would take for a permanent dip to form in her mattress.

The only thing that woke her up at all was a single text from Lena. A terrifying text, asking to talk. She didn't turn up when Kara didn't reply, which was relieving, giving her a moment to breathe and keep looking like shit without wondering if Lena would come round to blow everything up. It felt a bit like cowardice, but Kara found she was surprisingly ok with that. Shame had long since settled into Kara like a particularly tough hangnail — it bled, and it tugged when it caught something rough, but for the most part, it was a dull, docile kind of pain, so familiar she barely thought twice about it.

It was only temporary. She was just got to take a minute, get her head right and then she'll do… something.

Kara hadn't thought far enough ahead to figure out what precisely this situation needed, mostly because when she thought about her life and her relationship with Lena for more than five minutes at a time, she wound up with that same splitting headache.

This avoidance, the lack of confrontation wasn't natural or particularly comfortable, but Kara was tired of the other thing. Sweeping it all under the rug and pretending. Kara knew that Lena hadn't deserved the hurt and grief that had been making her sick. Lena had already gotten her rotten; she didn't need the reality that nothing left inside her was salvageable at all. Everything else all felt so true and so real because Kara knew with her whole heart that she loved Lena, but she also knew how deep her scars ran. That she'd been painting a veneer of good intentions over it, but it was just too fucked up. She was too fucked up.

Tension lived in the spaces between them. There was some sort of snapped bad choice in her brain, everything that could ever go wrong did, and she caused it because the darkness inside her was eating her up and she felt weak for having it and weak for not talking about it. The numbness had started to drift over her, out of her, like an overfilled bath. Pooling across the floor like a flood and she couldn't stop without getting her feet wet. She felt Lena's absence like a wound. It hadn't been this bad the week before, or the week before that. Maybe it would keep getting worse, until she could only lay limp on the floor when Lena wasn't there to prop her up. But there's too much she doesn't know how to answer.

But when she does think about it, usually during a long sleepless night alone, standing at the window of her room, half hovering in the air and almost wanting to get caught, if only for something to happen, it gets kind of impossible to ignore that if anyone else had treated Lena the way she had even once, she wouldn't be able to contain her rage for them.

It was a realisation that made her feel utterly fractured, a vase carelessly smashed and glued back together in a hurry; barely staying together, pieces all in the wrong place, each jagged shard a disparate, aching want.

It was confusing.

It was hopeless.

And that headache just persisted well into the following morning, when she was bleary-eyed from lack of calories and not enough sun exposure and still playing hooky from work like she couldn't get fired a second time.

She couldn't sleep anymore. There was too much sleep, and she wasn't tired. She was restless. She was something. She needed to get it out, let it out. And all around her on all the walls were the same fucking pictures of her and Alex. The same ones, everywhere, staring down at her, taunting her, mocking her. Kara paced and paced and paced until she almost wore a hole in the floor. Just for the sake of something to do, she took one down and examined it closely. Just for something to do, she let it fall from her fingers and shatter. 

Then another. And another.

Then she laughed and kept breaking. Then she cried and pulled and hurled. Then she screamed, and she burned some of them to instant cinders. Until there were no pictures left, just scrubbed ghosts, broken frames, torn lives and her, crying on the floor in the middle of it all.

In the end, it didn't matter what day it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still kicking around on Tumblr, rattling my stick in a bucket @assumingminds19. 
> 
> Send me an ask, follow, comment here and let me know what you thought!


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